earth with a last kind word. At rest from long wanderings, the woman, whose early memory went back to the storming of Athens by Roman legionaries, and whose later life had passed from Italy to Asia, unites the lands of her birth and adoption and decease in her farewell.[45] For all ranks and ages--the baby gone to be a flower in Persephone's crowned hair, the young scholar, dear to men and dearer to the Muses, the great sage who, from the seclusion of his Alexandrian library, has seen three kings succeed to the throne[46]-- the recompense of life is peace. Peace is on the graves of the good servant, the faithful nurse, the slave who does not even in the tomb forget his master's kindness or cease to help him at need.[47] Even the pets of the household, the dog or the singing-bird, or the caged cricket shouting through the warm day, have their reward in death, their slight memorial and their lasting rest. The shrill cicala, silent and no more looked on by the sun, finds a place in the meadows whose flowers the Queen of the Dead herself keeps bright with dew.[48] The sweet-throated song-bird, the faithful watch-dog who kept the house from harm, the speckled partridge in the coppice,[49] go at the appointed time upon their silent way--/ipsas angusti terminus aevi excipit/--and come into human sympathy because their bright life is taken to its rest like man's own in so brief a term. Before this gentler view of death grief itself becomes softened. "Fare thou well even in the house of Hades," says the friend over the grave of the friend: the words are the same as those of Achilles over Patroclus, but all the wild anguish has gone out of them.[50] Over the ashes of Theognis of Sinope, without a word of sorrow, with hardly a pang of pain, Glaucus sets a stone in memory of the companionship of many years. And in the tenderest and most placid of epitaphs on dead friends doubt vanishes with grief and acquiescence passes into hope, as the survivor of that union "which conquers Time indeed, and is eternal, separate from fears," prays Sabinus, if it be permitted, not even among the dead to let the severing water of Lethe pass his lips.[51] Out of peace comes the fruit of blessing. The drowned sailor rests the easier in his grave that the lines written over it bid better fortune to others who adventure the sea. "Go thou upon thy business and obtain thy desire,"[52] says the dead man to the passer-by, and the kind word makes the weight of his own darkness less to bear. Amazonia of Thessalonica from her tomb bids husband and children cease their lamentations and be only glad while they remember her.[53] Such recompence is in death that the dead sailor or shepherd becomes thenceforth the genius of the shore or the hillside.[54] The sacred sleep under earth sends forth a vague and dim effluence; in a sort of trance between life and death the good still are good and do not wholly cease out of being.[55]