Note 51 — Chapter VIII · THE GNOMIC POETS.

The sentiment of these last lines is not only ethically spirited, but it is also singularly, exquisitely Greek. The æsthetic tact of the Greek race felt the plastic charm of a youth's form dead upon the battle-field. Like a statue marbled by the frost of death he lies, the perfection of life-moulded clay; and his red wounds are the lips of everlasting praise. Not so the elder man. Nakedness and mutilation bring no honor to him; he has no loveliness of shape to be revealed and heightened by the injuries of war; for him the flowing beard and the robes of reverend eld are a majestic covering, to be withdrawn by no hand seeking to unveil secluded beauties. His lot is cast no longer in those fields, intense and passionate of art and love, where death, cropping the bloom unset, confers a crown of immortality. Cf. Iliad, xxii. 71. An echo of this Greek feeling for the beautiful young dead may be traced in David's picture of the drummer-boy at Avignon, in Walt Whitman, and in Lord Albemarle's "Recollections of Waterloo."