Beyond this simplicity and pathos cannot reach. But there is a group
of three epigrams yet unmentioned[36] which, in their union of these
qualities with the most severe magnificence of language and with the
poignant and vivid emotion of a tragical Border ballad, reach an even
more amazing height: that where Ariston of Cyrene, lying dead by the
Icarian rocks, cries out in passionate urgency on mariners who go
sailing by to tell Meno how his son perished; that where the tomb of
Biton in the morning sun, under the walls of Torone, sends a like
message by the traveller to the childless father, Nicagoras of
Amphipolis; and most piercing of all in their sorrow and most splendid
in their cadences, the stately lines that tell the passer-by of
Polyanthus, sunk off Sciathus in the stormy Aegean, and laid in his
grave by the young wife to whom only a dead body was brought home by
the fishermen as they sailed into harbour under a flaring and windy
dawn.

Less numerous than these poems of sea-sorrow, but with the same
trouble of darkness, the same haunting chill, are others where death
comes through the gloom of wet nights, in the snowstorm or the
thunderstorm or the autumn rains that drown the meadow and swell the
ford. The contrast of long golden summer days may perhaps make the
tidings of death more pathetic, and wake a more delicate pity; but the
physical horror, as in the sea-pieces, is keener at the thought of
lonely darkness, and storm in the night. Few pictures can be more
vivid than that of the oxen coming unherded down the hill through the
heavy snow at dusk, while high on the mountain side their master lies
dead, struck by lightning; or of Ion, who slipped overboard, unnoticed
in the darkness, while the sailors drank late into night at their
anchorage; or of the strayed revellers, Orthon and Polyxenus, who,