brought any reasonable grief. To the cold and profound thought of
Marcus Aurelius death is "a natural thing, like roses in spring or
harvest in autumn."[6] But these are the words of a strange language.
The feeling of Simonides is not, like theirs, abstract and remote; he
offers no justification, because none is felt to be needed where the
pain of death is absorbed in the ardour of life.

That great period passed away; and in those which follow it, the
sepulchural inscription, while it retains the old simplicity, descends
from those heights into more common feelings, lets loose emotion, even
dallies with the ornaments of grief. The sorrow of death is spoken of
freely; nor is there any poetry more pathetic than those epitaphs
which, lovely in their sadness, commemorate the lost child, the
sundered lovers, the disunited life. Among the most beautiful are
those on children: on the baby that just lived, and, liking it not,
went away again before it had known good or evil;[7] on the children
of a house all struck down in one day and buried in one grave;[8] on
the boy whom his parents could not keep, though they held both his
little hands in theirs, led downward by the Angel of Death to the
unsmiling land.[9] Then follows the keener sadness of the young life,
spared till it opened into flower only to be cut down before noon; the
girl who, sickening for her baby-brother, lost care for her playmates,
and found no peace till she went to rejoin him;[10] the boy of twelve,
with whom his father, adding no words of lamentation, lays his whole
hope in the grave;[11] the cry of the mourning mother over her son,
Bianor or Anticles, an only child laid on the funeral pyre before an
only parent's eyes, leaving dawn thenceforth disadorned of her
sweetness, and no comfort in the sun.[12] More piercing still in their
sad sweetness are the epitaphs on young wives; on Anastasia, dead at
sixteen, in the first year of her marriage, over whom the ferryman of