To make of poetry a spontaneous overflow of powerful emotion, usually of sorrowful emotion, is what the French understand by lyricism (_le lyrisme_); and it may be objected that it is not fair to compare an epic poet like Homer with a lyricist like Musset. Let us then take for our comparison the poet whom the ancients themselves looked upon as the supreme type of the lyricist--Pindar. He is superbly imaginative, “sailing,” as Gray tells us, “with supreme dominion through the azure deep of air,” but his imagination is not like that of Musset in the service of sensibility. He does not bestow his own emotions upon us but is rather in the Aristotelian sense an imitator. He is indeed at the very opposite pole from Rousseau and the “apostles of affliction.” “Let a man,” he says, “not darken delight in his life.” “Disclose not to strangers our burden of care; this at least shall I advise thee. Therefore is it fitting to show openly to all the folk the fair and pleasant things allotted us; but if any baneful misfortune sent of heaven befalleth man, it is seemly to shroud this in darkness.”[231] And one should also note Pindar’s hostility towards that other great source of romantic lyricism--nostalgia (“The desire of the moth for the star”), and the closely allied pursuit of the strange and the exotic. He tells of the condign punishment visited by Apollo upon the girl Coronis who became enamoured of “a strange man from Arcadia,” and adds: “She was in love with things remote--that passion which many ere now have felt. For among men, there is a foolish company of those who, putting shame on what they have at home, cast their glances afar, and pursue idle dreams in hopes that shall not be fulfilled.”[232] We are not to suppose that Pindar was that most tiresome and superficial of all types--the professional optimist who insists on inflicting his “gladness” upon us. “The immortals,” he says, “apportion to man two sorrows for every boon they grant.”[233] In general the Greek whom Kipling sings and whom we already find in Schiller--the Greek who is an incarnation of the “joy of life unquestioned, the everlasting wondersong of youth”[234]--is a romantic myth. We read in the Iliad:[235] “Of all the creatures that breathe or crawl upon the earth, none is more wretched than man.” Here is the “joy of life unquestioned” in Homer. Like Homer the best of the later Greeks and Romans face unflinchingly the facts of life and these facts do not encourage a thoughtless elation. Their melancholy is even more concerned with the lot of man in general than with their personal and private grief. The quality of this melancholy is rendered in Tennyson’s line on Virgil, one of the finest in nineteenth century English poetry: Thou majestic in thy sadness at the doubtful doom of human kind.[236]