Of the serious classic pieces one of the most beautiful and moving is "Tithonus." The tale is familiar: the beautiful youth Tithonus was beloved by the goddess of the Dawn, and her love bestowed immortality on him; _but they both forgot to ask for immortal youth_. So he grew old: and the pathos of the boon, granted by love at love's request, thus turning out a curse, is the motive of the tale. He speaks: Yet hold me not for ever in thine East: How can my nature longer mix with thine? Coldly thy rosy shadows bathe me, cold Are all thy lights, and cold my wrinkled feet Upon thy glimmering thresholds, when the steam Floats up from those dim fields about the homes Of happy men that have the power to die, And grassy barrows of the happier dead. Release me, and restore me to the ground; Thou seëst all things, thou wilt see my grave: Thou wilt renew thy beauty morn by morn; I earth in earth forget these empty courts, And thee returning on thy silver wheels. A great scholar has said that it is one of the most incomparable powers of poetry _to make sad things beautiful_, and so to go some way towards healing the sorrow in the reader's heart. He was speaking of Greek Tragedy; but there is, I think, a deep truth in the saying, and it is not confined to that particular form of poetry. And I know no better instance of the truth than the singularly beautiful poem quoted above. But the classic influences are, of course, not limited to the avowed borrowings from ancient legend. There are constantly lines in Tennyson where the student of ancient poetry recognizes a phrase--a turn--an echo--beautiful in themselves, and giving a special pleasure to the instructed reader; such a line as "When the first matin-song hath wakened loud," which occurs in the "Address to Memory"--the striking early poem containing the description of his Somersby home--and is itself an exquisitely turned translation from Sophocles' _Electra_. So again we have an echo from Homer through Virgil, in the half-playful line, "This way and that dividing the swift mind"; or, again, the vivid simile from Theocritus in the bold description: And arms on which the standing muscles sloped, As slopes a wild brook o'er a little stone, Running too vehemently to break upon it.[87]