But Alexander cannot contemplate the end of men and things in this calm fashion. To him, as to Achilles, death is “malign and intercepting.” It bears no thought of peace or rest. He describes it as “that frustrate, stagnant, ineffectual bourn where substance melts to shadow.” Far away in “the dimness of the dolorous realm” he sees, though sad, “the unvanquishable youth” of Achilles surviving and lamenting—
“Despite the embalm'd, purpureal airs and gleam
Immeasurable of amaranthine meads,
The keen, reviving, strenuous airs of earth,
And blasts from battle-fields”—
that is the very breath of his nostrils—earth, life, action, with a purpose in it, and the keen intoxication of occasional “blasts from battle-fields.”
But he is not a mere genius errant, a Don Quixote of conquerors, wasting himself on windmills and flocks of sheep. He has a clear, resolute purpose before his mind, to which he shapes all things. It is to make the world one empire, which Grecian intellect should rule. The Governor of Sardis, when the Granicus is won, he bids:
“Tell those realms
Betwixt the Euxine and Pamphylian Seas,
That Grecian galaxy of Lesser Asia,