them, to die either was to be annihilated or to pass a monotonous existence without fear but also without hope. In the one case Wordsworth's lines are applicable to them as well as to "Lucy:"—
"No motion has she now, no force:
She neither hears nor sees;
Rolled round in earth's diurnal course,
With rocks and stones and trees."
They held with Claudio that
"The weariest and most loathèd worldly life
That age, ache, penury, and imprisonment
Can lay on nature, is a paradise
To what we fear of death."[1]
Or they would say with the great Achilles in the Shades, when Ulysses congratulated him on being so honoured among dead heroes:—
"Renowned Ulysses, think not death a theme
Of consolation: I had rather live,
The servile hind for hire, and eat the bread
Of some man scantily himself sustained,
Than sovereign empire hold o'er all the Shades."[2]
There may be an approach to comedy in the scene between Admetus and his father Pheres. The son asks his grey-haired sire, who brings gifts to the funeral, "if he is not ashamed of himself for cumbering the ground so long? Why did he not, an old fellow and a useless, take the place of poor Alcestis?" Pheres replies, and with some shov of reason, "If you were
- ↑ "Measure for Measure."
- ↑ Odyssey, xi. (Cowper.)
