only of another country where life should have its intricacies
simplified, its injustices remedied, its evanescent beauty fixed, and
its brief joy made full, became an imperious instinct that claimed
satisfaction, through definite religious teaching or the dreams of
philosophy or the visions of poetry. And so the last words of Greek
sepulchral poetry express, through questions and doubts, in metaphor
and allegory, the final belief in some blessedness beyond death. Who
knows whether to live be not death, and to be dead life? so the
haunting hope begins. The Master of the Portico died young; does he
sleep in the quiet embrace of earth, or live in the joy of the other
world?[58] "Even in life what makes each one of us to be what we are
is only the soul; and when we are dead, the bodies of the dead are
rightly said to be our shades or images; for the true and immortal
being of each one of us, which is called the soul, goes on her way to
other gods, that before them she may give an account."[59] These are
the final words left to men by that superb and profound genius the
dream of whose youth had ended in the flawless lines[60] whose music
Shelley's own could scarcely render:

Thou wert the Morning Star among the living
Ere thy fair light was fled;
Now, having died, thou art as Hesperus, giving
New splendour to the dead.

And at last, not from the pen of Plato nor written in lines of gold,
but set by a half-forgotten friend over an obscure grave,[61] comes
the certitude of that long hope. Heliodorus and Diogeneia died on the
same day and are buried under the same stone: but love admits no such
bar to its continuance, and the tomb is as a bridal chamber for their
triumphant life.