cricket shouting through the warm day, have their reward in death,
their slight memorial and their lasting rest. The shrill cicala,
silent and no more looked on by the sun, finds a place in the meadows
whose flowers the Queen of the Dead herself keeps bright with dew.[48]
The sweet-throated song-bird, the faithful watch-dog who kept the
house from harm, the speckled partridge in the coppice,[49] go at the
appointed time upon their silent way--/ipsas angusti terminus aevi
excipit/--and come into human sympathy because their bright life is
taken to its rest like man's own in so brief a term.

Before this gentler view of death grief itself becomes softened. "Fare
thou well even in the house of Hades," says the friend over the grave
of the friend: the words are the same as those of Achilles over
Patroclus, but all the wild anguish has gone out of them.[50] Over the
ashes of Theognis of Sinope, without a word of sorrow, with hardly a
pang of pain, Glaucus sets a stone in memory of the companionship of
many years. And in the tenderest and most placid of epitaphs on dead
friends doubt vanishes with grief and acquiescence passes into hope,
as the survivor of that union "which conquers Time indeed, and is
eternal, separate from fears," prays Sabinus, if it be permitted, not
even among the dead to let the severing water of Lethe pass his
lips.[51]

Out of peace comes the fruit of blessing. The drowned sailor rests the
easier in his grave that the lines written over it bid better fortune
to others who adventure the sea. "Go thou upon thy business and obtain
thy desire,"[52] says the dead man to the passer-by, and the kind word
makes the weight of his own darkness less to bear. Amazonia of
Thessalonica from her tomb bids husband and children cease their
lamentations and be only glad while they remember her.[53] Such