recompence is in death that the dead sailor or shepherd becomes
thenceforth the genius of the shore or the hillside.[54] The sacred
sleep under earth sends forth a vague and dim effluence; in a sort of
trance between life and death the good still are good and do not
wholly cease out of being.[55]

For the doctrine of immortality did not dawn upon the world at any
single time or from any single quarter. We are accustomed, perhaps, to
think of it as though it came like sunrise out of the dark, /lux
sedentibus in tenebris/, giving a new sense to mankind and throwing
over the whole breadth of life a vivid severance of light from shadow,
putting colour and sharp form into what had till then all lain dim in
the dusk, like Virgil's woodland path under the glimpses of a fitful
moon. Rather it may be compared to those scattered lights that
watchers from Mount Ida were said to discern moving hither and thither
in the darkness, and at last slowly gathering and kindling into the
clear pallor of dawn.[56] So it is that those half-formed beliefs,
those hints and longings, still touch us with the freshness of our own
experience. For the ages of faith, if such there be, have not yet
come; still in the mysterious glimmer of a doubtful light men wait for
the coming of the unrisen sun. During a brief and brilliant period the
splendour of corporate life had absorbed the life of the citizen; an
Athenian of the age of Pericles may have, for the moment, found Athens
all-sufficient to his needs. With the decay of that glory it became
plain that this single life was insufficient, that it failed in
permanence and simplicity. We all dwell in a single native country,
the universe, said Meleager,[57] expressing a feeling that had become
the common heritage of his race. But that country, as men saw it, was
but ill governed; and in nothing more so than in the rewards and
punishments it gave to its citizens. To regard it as the vestibule