sardonic pleasure in confounding expectation, making destruction
spring out of apparent safety, and filling life with dramatic and
memorable reversals of fortune.

And besides the bolts launched by fate, life was as surely if more
slowly weighed down by the silent and ceaseless tide of change against
which nothing stood fixed or permanent, and which swept the finest and
most beautiful things away the soonest. The garland that blooms at
night withers by morning; and the strength of man and the beauty of
women are no longer-lived than the frail anemone, the lily and violet
that flower and fall.[2] Sweetness is changed to bitterness; where the
rose has spread her cup, one goes by and the brief beauty passes;
returning, the seeker finds no rose, but a thorn. Swifter than the
flight of a bird through the air the light-footed Hours pass by,
leaving nothing but scattered petals and the remembrance of youth and
spring.[3] The exhortation to use the brief space of life, to realise,
and, so far as that may be, to perpetuate in action the whole of the
overwhelming possibilities crowded into a minute's space[4] comes with
a passion like that of Shakespeare's sonnets. "On this short day of
frost and sun to sleep before evening" is the one intolerable misuse
of life.[5] Sometimes the feeling is expressed with the vivid passion
of a lyric:--"To what profit? for thou wilt not find a lover among the
dead, O girl";[6] sometimes with the curiously impersonal and
incomparably direct touch that is peculiar to Greek, as in the verses
by Antipater of Sidon,[7] that by some delicate magic crowd into a few
words the fugitive splendour of the waning year, the warm lingering
days and sharp nights of autumn, and the brooding pause before the
rigours of winter, and make the whole masque of the seasons a pageant
and metaphor of the lapse of life itself. Or a later art finds in the
harsh moralisation of ancient legends the substance of sermons on the