Rambles and studies in Greece . dar thoughts and aspirations ofa very different kind. We have in the fragmentsof his poetry more than one passage asserting thereward of the just, and the splendours of a futurelife far happier than that which we now , notwithstanding these splendid visions, suchhigh expectation laid no hold upon the imagina-tion of the Greek world. The poems of Pindar, weare told, soon ceased to be popular, and his visionsare but a streak of light amid general gloom. Thekingdom of the dead in yEschylus is evidently, asin Homer, but a weary echo of this life, wherehonou
Rambles and studies in Greece . dar thoughts and aspirations ofa very different kind. We have in the fragmentsof his poetry more than one passage asserting thereward of the just, and the splendours of a futurelife far happier than that which we now , notwithstanding these splendid visions, suchhigh expectation laid no hold upon the imagina-tion of the Greek world. The poems of Pindar, weare told, soon ceased to be popular, and his visionsare but a streak of light amid general gloom. Thekingdom of the dead in yEschylus is evidently, asin Homer, but a weary echo of this life, wherehonour can only be attained by the pious memoryof loving kinsfolk, whose duty paid to the deadaffects him in his gloomier state, and raises him inesteem of his less-remembered fellows. Sopho-cles says nothing to clear away the night; nay,rather his deepest and maturest contemplation re-gards death as the worst of ills to the happy man—a sorry refuge to the miserable. Euripides longsthat there may be no future state, and Plato only. .All. IN 1 III I I in.] ATITEXS—TIIE TOMBS. 73 secures the immortality of the soul by severingit from the person—the man, and all his interests. It is plain, from these evidences, that the Greeksmust have looked upon the death of those theyloved with unmixed sorrow. It was the final part-ing, when all the good and pleasant things areremembered ; when men seek, as it were, to in-crease the pang, by clothing the dead in all hissweetest and dearest presence. But this was notdone by pompous inscriptions, nor by a vainenumeration of all the deceased had performed—inscriptions which, among us, tell more of thevanity than of the grief of the survivors. Thecommonest epitaph was a simple \difjs, or farewell;and it is this single word, so full and deep in itsmeaning to those who love, which is pictured inthe reliefs of which I am now speaking. They aresimple parting scenes, expressing the grief of thesurvivors, and the great sadness of the sufferer,who is g
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