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, should look
like ivory stained with purple;[86] and having always around them, in
the motion and majesty of this beauty, enough for the full employment
of their imagination, they shrank with dread or hatred from all the
ruggedness of lower nature,--from the wrinkled forest bark, the jagged
hill-crest, and irregular, inorganic storm of sky; looking to these
for the most part as adverse powers, and taking pleasure only in such
portions of the lower world as were at once conducive to the rest and
health of the human frame, and in harmony with the laws of its gentler
beauty.
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