the dead must needs mingle his own with her father's and her husband's
tears; on Atthis of Cnidos, the wife who had never left her husband
till this the first and last sundering came; on Paulina of Ravenna,
holy of life and blameless, the young bride of the physician whose
skill could not save her, but whose last testimony to her virtues has
survived the wreck of the centuries that have made the city crumble
and the very sea retire.[13] The tender feeling for children mingles
with the bitter grief at their loss, a touch of fancy, as though they
were flowers plucked by Persephone to be worn by her and light up the
greyness of the underworld. Cleodicus, dead before the festival of
this third birthday, when the child's hair was cut and he became a
boy, lies in his little coffin; but somewhere by unknown Acheron a
shadow of him grows fair and strong in youth, though he never may
return to earth again.[14]

With the grief for loss comes the piercing cry over crushed beauty.
One of the early epitaphs, written before the period of the Persian
wars, is nothing but this cry: "pity him who was so beautiful and is
dead."[15] In the same spirit is the fruitless appeal so often made
over the haste of Death; /mais que te nuysoit elle en vie, mort?/ Was
he not thine, even had he died an old man? says the mourner over
Attalus.[16] A subject whose strange fascination drew artist after
artist to repeat it, and covered the dreariness of death as with a
glimmer of white blossoms, was Death the Bridegroom, the maiden taken
away from life just as it was about to be made complete. Again and
again the motive is treated with delicate profusion of detail, and
lingering fancy draws out the sad likeness between the two torches
that should hold such a space of lovely life between them,[17] now
crushed violently together and mingling their fires. Already the
bride-bed was spread with saffron in the gilded chamber; already the