shipwrecked"; in these words again and again the verses begin. What follows is sometimes an appeal to others to take example: "let him have only his own hardihood to blame, who looses moorings from my grave"; sometimes it is a call to courage: "I perished; yet even then other ships sailed safely on." Another, in words incomparable for their perfect pathos and utter simplicity, neither counsels nor warns: "O mariners, well be with you at sea and on land; but know that you pass the tomb of a shipwrecked man." And in the same spirit another sends a blessing out of his nameless tomb: "O sailor, ask not whose grave I am, but be thine own fortune a kinder sea."[35] Beyond this simplicity and pathos cannot reach. But there is a group of three epigrams yet unmentioned[36] which, in their union of these qualities with the most severe magnificence of language and with the poignant and vivid emotion of a tragical Border ballad, reach an even more amazing height: that where Ariston of Cyrene, lying dead by the Icarian rocks, cries out in passionate urgency on mariners who go sailing by to tell Meno how his son perished; that where the tomb of Biton in the morning sun, under the walls of Torone, sends a like message by the traveller to the childless father, Nicagoras of Amphipolis; and most piercing of all in their sorrow and most splendid in their cadences, the stately lines that tell the passer-by of Polyanthus, sunk off Sciathus in the stormy Aegean, and laid in his grave by the young wife to whom only a dead body was brought home by the fishermen as they sailed into harbour under a flaring and windy dawn. Less numerous than these poems of sea-sorrow, but with the same trouble of darkness, the same haunting chill, are others where death comes through the gloom of wet nights, in the snowstorm or the thunderstorm or the autumn rains that drown the meadow and swell the ford. The contrast of long golden summer days may perhaps make the tidings of death more pathetic, and wake a more delicate pity; but the physical horror, as in the sea-pieces, is keener at the thought of lonely darkness, and storm in the night. Few pictures can be more vivid than that of the oxen coming unherded down the hill through the heavy snow at dusk, while high on the mountain side their master lies dead, struck by lightning; or of Ion, who slipped overboard, unnoticed in the darkness, while the sailors drank late into night at their anchorage; or of the strayed revellers, Orthon and Polyxenus, who, bewildered in the rainy night, with the lights of the banquet still flaring in their eyes, stumbled on the slippery hill-path and lay dead at the foot of the cliff.[37]