in it. So they set themselves to reach this, and having gained
it, gave it their principal thoughts, and set it off with beautiful
dress as best they might. But making this their object, they were
obliged to pass their lives in simple exercise and disciplined
employments. Living wholesomely, giving themselves no fever fits,
either by fasting or over-eating, constantly in the open air, and full
of animal spirit and physical power, they became incapable of every
morbid condition of mental emotion. Unhappy love, disappointed
ambition, spiritual despondency, or any other disturbing sensation,
had little power over the well-braced nerves, and healthy flow of the
blood; and what bitterness might yet fasten on them was soon boxed or
raced out of a boy, and spun or woven out of a girl, or danced out of
both. They had indeed their sorrows, true and deep, but still, more
like children's sorrows than ours, whether bursting into open cry of
pain, or hid with shuddering under the veil, still passing over the
soul as clouds do over heaven, not sullying it, not mingling with
it;--darkening it perhaps long or utterly, but still not becoming one
with it, and for the most part passing away in dashing rain of tears,
and leaving the man unchanged; in no wise affecting, as our sorrow
does, the whole tone of his thought and imagination thenceforward.

How far our melancholy may be deeper and wider than theirs in its
roots and view, and therefore nobler, we shall consider presently; but
at all events, they had the advantage of us in being entirely free
from all those dim and feverish sensations which result from unhealthy
state of the body. I believe that a large amount of the dreamy and
sentimental sadness, tendency to reverie, and general patheticalness
of modern life results merely from derangement of stomach; holding to
the Greek life the same relation that the feverish night of an adult
does to a child's sleep.

Farther. The human beauty, which, whether in its bodily being or in
imagined divinity, had become, for the reasons we have seen, the
principal object of culture and sympathy to these Greeks, was, in its
perfection, eminently orderly, symmetrical, and tender. Hence,
contemplating it constantly in this state, they could not but feel a
proportionate fear of all that was disorderly, unbalanced, and rugged.
Having trained their stoutest soldiers into a strength so delicate and
lovely, that their white flesh, with their blood upon it,