never show.

"I could turn and live with animals, they are so placid and
self-contained,
I stand and look at them long and long;
They do not sweat and whine about their condition.
They do not lie awake in the dark and weep for their sins.
Not one is dissatisfied, not one is demented with the mania of
owning things,
Not one kneels to another, nor to his kind that lived thousands
of years ago,
Not one is respectable or unhappy over the whole earth."[40]

[40] Song of Myself, 32.

No natural pagan could have written these well-known lines. But on the
other hand Whitman is less than a Greek or Roman; for their
consciousness, even in Homeric times, was full to the brim of the sad
mortality of this sunlit world, and such a consciousness Walt Whitman
resolutely refuses to adopt. When, for example, Achilles, about to
slay Lycaon, Priam's young son, hears him sue for mercy, he stops to
say:--

"Ah, friend, thou too must die: why thus lamentest thou? Patroclos
too is dead, who was better far than thou.... Over me too hang death
and forceful fate. There cometh morn or eve or some noonday when my
life too some man shall take in battle, whether with spear he smite, or
arrow from the string."[41]

[41] Iliad, XXI., E. Myers's translation.

Then Achilles savagely severs the poor boy's neck with his sword,
heaves him by the foot into the Scamander, and calls to the fishes of
the river to eat the white fat of Lycaon. Just as here the cruelty and
the sympathy each ring true, and do not mix or interfere with one
another, so did the Greeks and Romans keep all their sadnesses and
gladnesses unmingled and entire. Instinctive good they did not reckon
sin; nor had they any such desire to save the credit of the universe as
to make them insist, as so many of US insist, that what immediately
appears as evil must be "good in the making," or something equally
ingenious. Good was good, and bad just bad, for the earlier Greeks.
They neither denied the ills of nature--Walt Whitman's verse, "What is
called good is perfect and what is called bad is just as perfect,"
would have been mere silliness to them--nor did they, in order to
escape from those ills, invent "another and a better world" of the
imagination, in which, along with the ills, the innocent goods of sense
would also find no place. This integrity of the instinctive reactions,
this freedom from all moral sophistry and strain, gives