lightly over his grey temples, and the earliest flowers of spring
blossom above his dust.[41] The lovely lines of Leonidas,[42] in which
Clitagoras asks that when he is dead the sheep may bleat over him, and
the shepherd pipe from the rock as they graze softly along the valley,
and that the countryman in spring may pluck a posy of meadow flowers
and lay it on his grave, have all the tenderness of an English
pastoral in a land of soft outlines and silvery tones. An intenser
feeling for nature and a more consoling peace is in the nameless poem
that bids the hill-brooks and the cool upland pastures tell the bees,
when they go forth anew on their flowery way, that their old keeper
fell asleep on a winter night, and will not come back with spring.[43]
The lines call to mind that magnificent passage of the /Adonais/ where
the thought of earth's annual resurrection calms by its glory and
beauty the very sorrow which it rekindles; as those others, where,
since the Malian fowler is gone, the sweet plane again offers her
branches "for the holy bird to rest his swift wings,"[44] are echoed
in the famous Ode where the note of the immortal bird sets the
listener in the darkness at peace with Death. The dying man leaves
earth with a last kind word. At rest from long wanderings, the woman,
whose early memory went back to the storming of Athens by Roman
legionaries, and whose later life had passed from Italy to Asia,
unites the lands of her birth and adoption and decease in her
farewell.[45] For all ranks and ages--the baby gone to be a flower in
Persephone's crowned hair, the young scholar, dear to men and dearer
to the Muses, the great sage who, from the seclusion of his
Alexandrian library, has seen three kings succeed to the throne[46]--
the recompense of life is peace. Peace is on the graves of the good
servant, the faithful nurse, the slave who does not even in the tomb
forget his master's kindness or cease to help him at need.[47] Even
the pets of the household, the dog or the singing-bird, or the caged