repeated in an anonymous epigram,[2] Let us eat and drink, for
to-morrow we die. In finer tempers it issues in a mood strangely
mingled of weakness of will and lucidity of intelligence, like that of
Omar Khayyam. Many of the stanzas of the Persian poet have a close
parallel, not only in thought but in actual turn of phrase, in verses
of the later epigrammatists.[3] The briefness of life when first
realised makes youth feverish and self-absorbed. "Other men perhaps
will be, but /I/ shall be dead and turned into black earth"--as though
that were the one thing of importance.[4] Or again, the beauty of
returning spring is felt in the blood as an imperious call to renew
the delight in the simplest physical pleasures, food and scent of
flowers and walks in the fresh country air, and to thrust away the
wintry thought of dead friends who cannot share those delights now.[5]
The earliest form taken by the instinct of self-preservation and the
revolt against death can hardly be called by a milder name than
swaggering. "I don't care," the young man cries,[6] with a sort of
faltering bravado. Snatch the pleasure of the moment, such is the
selfish instinct of man before his first imagination of life, and
then, and then let fate do its will upon you.[7] Thereafter, as the
first turbulence of youth passes, its first sadness succeeds, with the
thought of all who have gone before and all who are to follow, and of
the long night of silence under the ground. Touches of tenderness
break in upon the reveller; thoughts of the kinship of earth, as the
drinker lifts the sweet cup wrought of the same clay as he; submission
to the lot of mortality; counsels to be generous while life lasts, "to
give and to share"; the renunciation of gross ambitions such as wealth
and power, with some likeness or shadow in it of the crowning virtue
of humility.[8]

It is here that the change begins. To renounce something for the first