Horace does this too; but out of the sad certainty of mortality he seems to extract a keener zest for the too brief enjoyment of the flying hours. Why is this? Probably because by the pagan mind life on this side the grave was regarded as a thing more precious, more noble, than the life beyond. That there was a life beyond was undoubtedly the general belief. _"Sunt aliquid Manes; letum non omnia finit, Luridaque evictos effugit umbra rogos,_"-- "The Manes are no dream; death closes not Our all of being, and the wan-visaged shade Escapes unscathed from the funereal fires," says Propertius (Eleg. IV. 7); and unless this were so, there would be no meaning whatever in the whole pagan idea of Hades--in the "_domus exilis Plutonia_;" in the Hermes driving the spirits of the dead across the Styx; in the "_judicantem Aeacum, sedesque, discretas piorum_"--the "Aeacus dispensing doom, and the Elysian Fields serene" (Odes, II. 13). But this after-life was a cold, sunless, unsubstantial thing, lower in quality and degree than the full, vigorous, passionate life of this world. The nobler spirits of antiquity, it hardly need be said, had higher dreams of a future state than this. For them, no more than for us, was it possible to rest in the conviction that their brief and troubled career on earth was to be the "be all and the end all" of existence, or that those whom they had loved and lost in death became thenceforth as though they had never been. It is idle to draw, as is often done, a different conclusion from such phrases as that after death we are a shadow and mere dust, "_pulvis et umbra sumus_!" or from Horace's bewildered cry (Odes, I. 24), when a friend of signal nobleness and purity is suddenly struck down--"_Ergo Quinctilium perpetuus sopor urget_?"--"And is Quinctilius, then, weighed down by a sleep that knows no waking?" We might as reasonably argue that Shakespeare did not believe in a life after death because he makes Prospero say-- "We are such stuff As dreams are made of, and our little life Is rounded with a sleep." Horace and Shakespeare both believed in an immortality, but it was an immortality different in its kind. Horace, indeed,--who, as a rule, is wisely silent on a question which for him had no solution, however much it may have engaged his speculations,--has gleams not unlike those which irradiate our happier creed, as when he writes (Odes, III. 2) of "_Virtus, recludens immeritis mori coelum, negata tentat iter via_"-- "Worth, which heaven's gates to those unbars Who never should have died, A pathway cleaves among the stars, To meaner souls denied."