The opinion of Achilles, that it was better to be a slave amongst men than a king over ghosts, is very much that which prevails in the Greece of to-day. Visions of a Christian paradise above the skies have much less hold on the popular mind than dread of a pagan Tartarus under the earth; and that full conviction that after all it was a very bad thing to die, that tendency to attach a paramount value to life, _per se_, and _quand même_, which constituted so significant a feature of the old Greeks, is equally characteristic of their modern representatives. The next world of the Romaic songs is far from being a place "where all smiles and is glad;" the forebodings of the Corsican's Chilina's mother are common enough here in Greece. "Rejoice in the present world, rejoice in the passing day," runs a [Greek: myrologion], quoted by Fauriel; "to-morrow you will be under the sod, and will behold the day no more." Down in Tartarus youths and maidens spend their time dismally in asking if there be yet an earth and a sky up above. Are there still churches and golden icons? Do people continue to work at their several trades? "Blessed are the mountains and the pastures," it is said, "where we meet not Charon." The parents of a dying girl ask of her why she is resolved to hasten into the other world where the cock crows not, and the hen clucks not; where there is no water and no grass, and where the hungry find it impossible to eat, and the tired are incapable of sleep. Why is she not content to abide at home? The girl replies she cannot, for yesterday, in the late evening, she was married, and her consort is the tomb. That is the peasant elegist's way of speaking of a sudden death, caused very likely by the chill of nightfall. Of another damsel, who succumbed to a long illness, "who had suffered as none before suffered under the sun," he narrates how she pressed her father's hand to her heart, saying: "Alas! my father, I am about to die." She clasped her mother's hand to her breast, saying: "Alas! my mother, I am about to die." Then she sent for her betrothed, and she bent over him and kissed him, and whispered softly into his ear: "Oh, my friend, when I am dead deck my grave as you would have decked my nuptial bed." We find in Greek poesy the universal legend of the lover who kills himself on hearing of the death of his mistress; but, as a rule, the regret of survivors is depicted as neither desperate nor durable. Long ago, three gallant youths plotted together to contrive an escape from Hades, and a fair-haired maiden prayed that they would take her with them; she did so wish to see her mother mourning her loss, her brothers weeping because she is no more. They answered: "As to thy brothers, poor girl, they are dancing, and thy mother diverts herself with gossiping in the street." The mournfully beautiful music that Schubert wedded to Claudius's little poem _Der Tod und das Mädchen_ might serve as melodious expression to many a one of these Grecian lays of dead damsels. Death will not halt because he hears a voice crying: "Tarry, I am still so young!" The future is as irrevocably fixed as the past; and if fate deals hardly by mortals, there is nothing to fall back upon but the sorry resignation of despair; such is the sombre folk philosophy of the land of eternal summer. Perhaps it is the very brightness of the sky and air that makes the quitting of this mortal coil so unspeakably grievous. The most horribly painful idea associated with death in the mind of the modern as of the ancient Greek is the idea of darkness, of separation from what Dante, yet more Greek than Italian in his passionate sun-worship, describes in a line which seems somehow to hold incarnate the thing it tells of--