preferred to cling tenaciously to the good he had, to the hills, and the sea, and the sunshine, rather than to
"Move among shadows, a shadow, and wail by impassable streams;"
and his choice, under the circumstances, is perhaps hardly a matter for amazement. That a people so richly endowed should be in love with life seems to us right and natural; that amid their keen realization of its fullness and beauty we find forever sounded—and not always in a minor key—the same old notes of weariness and pain is a discouraging item, when we would like to build up an exhaustive theory of happiness. Far, far back, in the Arcadian days of Grecian piety and simplicity, the devout agriculturist Hesiod looked sorrowfully over the golden fields, searching vainly for a joy that remained ever out of reach. Homer, in a passage which Mr. Peacock says is nearly always incorrectly translated, has given us a summary of life which would not put a modern German to the blush:—
"Jove, from his urns dispensing good and ill,
Gives ill unmixed to some, and good and ill
Mingled to many, good unmixed to none."
