of the world. But their noblest and clearest voices, Isaias, Jeremias, Ezekiel, speak a different language; and Solomon, who, it must be granted, enjoyed a wider experience than most men, renders a cheerless verdict of vanity and vexation of spirit for "all things that are done under the sun." The Egyptians, owing chiefly to their tender solicitude about their tombs, have taken rank in history as a people enamoured rather of death than of life; and from the misty flower-gardens of Buddha have been gathered for centuries the hemlock and nightshade that adorn the funeral-wreaths of literature.
But the Greeks, the blithe and jocund Greeks, who, as Mr. Arnold justly observed, ought never to have been either sick or sorry,—to them, at least, we can turn for that wholesome joy, that rational delight in mere existence, which we have somehow let slip from our nerveless grasp. Whether it was because this world gave him so much, such rare perfection in all material things, or because his own conception of the world to come promised him so exceedingly little,—for one or both of these reasons, the average Greek
