Page:The World as Will and Idea - Schopenhauer, tr. Haldane and Kemp - Volume 3.djvu/415

Rh beautiful poem preserved for us by Plutarch (De audiend. poët, in fine) this runs thus: –

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(Lugere genitum, tanta qui intrarit mala: At morte si quis finiisset miseriat, Hunc laude amicos atque lætitia exsequi.)

It is not to be attributed to historical relationship, but to the moral identity of the matter, that the Mexicans welcomed the new-born child with the words, "My child, thou art born to endure; therefore endure, suffer, and keep silence." And, following the same feeling, Swift (as Walter Scott relates in his Life of Swift) early adopted the custom of keeping his birthday not as a time of joy but of sadness, and of reading on that day the passage of the Bible in which Job laments and curses the day on which it was said in the house of his far her a man-child is born.

Well known and too long for quotation is the passage in the "Apology of Socrates," in which Plato makes this wisest of mortals say that death, even if it deprives us of consciousness for ever, would be a wonderful gain, for a deep, dreamless sleep every day is to be preferred even to the happiest life.

A saying of Heraclitus runs: "." (Vitæ nomen quidem est vita, opus autem mors. Etymologicum magnum, voce ; also Eustath. ad Iliad., i. p. 31.)

The beautiful lines of the "Theogony &quot; are famous: –

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(Optima sors homini natum non esse, nec unquam Adspexitse diem, flammiferumgue jubar. Alttra jam genitum demitti protinus Orco, Et pressum multa mergere corpus humo.)