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To join mine own, of whom the greater part

Among the dead doth Persephassa hold;

And I, of all the last and saddest, wend

My way below, life's little span unfilled."—(P.)

And then, as Socrates, her antitype, tries to console himself and his friends "with the thought that if death he not annihilation or a dreamless sleep, he may pace Elysian fields, and converse with the spirits of the good and wise; so the maiden dwells upon the hope that in death she too may not be divided from those who were nearest and dearest to her on earth—that she may meet her father and her mother, and the brother for whom she has sacrificed everything. But then again there swells up in her heart the remembrance of the pleasant life she is about to leave:—

And then she passes from the scene. We may pity her—indeed who could not?—but we can hardly realise the extent of her self-sacrifice. Like the Decii or