The expressions of grief over beloved dead are everywhere the same—the weeping and lamenting, the copious and eloquent allusion to what they were in life, and to the affection that was felt for them. Passionate emotion finds vent in lively, forcible, and dramatic indications of grief. But the restraining power of culture, which regulates even the emotional part of our nature, checks those over whom it has established its sway, and refuses to the feelings all expression by extravagant gesture. It is not so in a primitive state of society, or among children. Neither is it so among the common people, so called, who represent, in the midst of our civilisation, the epic period of human development. If we wish to convince ourselves that the epic men, heroes, chiefs, and kings, demeaned themselves as passionately in giving expression to their grief, as the Corsicans of the present time in their _ballata_, we must read the songs of Firdusi, Homer, and the Bible. Esau cries aloud and weeps for the stolen blessing; Jacob rends his clothes for Joseph; Job rends his garments, and tears his hair, and falls to the earth, and his friends do the same, lifting up their voice and weeping, and each rends his garment and sprinkles dust upon his head towards heaven. David rends his garments for Saul and Jonathan, and afflicts himself, and weeps, and laments; he does the same for Absalom: "the king wept, and had his head covered, and he went barefoot." Still more passionate and unbridled are the outbursts of grief with the men of Homer. Achilles laments for Patroclus, with both hands he strews black dust upon his head— "Then, stretch'd in ashes, at the vast extent Of his whole length he lay, disordering wild With his own hands, and rending off his hair. The maidens, captured by himself in war And by Patroclus, shrieking from the tent Ran forth, and hemm'd the glorious chief around; All smote their bosoms, and all, fainting, fell." When Hector falls, Hecuba tears her hair, and Priam piteously mourns and laments; and afterwards he says to Achilles, when he is begging of him a couch whereon to rest himself, that he has constantly sighed and groaned, full of endless sorrow, "rolling myself upon the earth in the court." So, in Firdusi, the hero Rustem tears his hair for his son Sohrab, roars for grief, and weeps blood; Sohrab's mother throws fire upon her head, rends her clothes, swoons continually, fills the hall with dust, weeps day and night, and dies in a year. The expression of the emotion is here in gigantic proportion, as the forms of the heroes themselves are colossal. In the Nibelungenlied, the greatest tragedy of the Vendetta, the expression of passionate grief is no less colossal. Chrimhild raises her wail of sorrow over the dead Siegfrid,—blood gushes from her throat, she weeps blood above his corpse, and all the women help her with their lamentations.