Page:History of Greece Vol I.djvu/495

MYTIIES AMONG THE EARLY GERMANS. 463 we not less analogous the absence of prose writing, positive/ records, and scientific culture. The preliminary basis and encouragements for the mythopceic faculty were thus extremely similar. But though the prolific forces were the same in kind, the re- sults were very different in degree, and the developing circum- stances were more different still. First, the abundance, the beauty, and the long continuance of early Grecian poetry, in the purely poetical age, is a phasnome- non which has no parallel elsewhere. Secondly, the transition of the Greek mind from its poetical to its comparatively positive state was self-operated, accomplished by its own inherent and expansive force aided indeed, but by no means either impressed or provoked, from without. From the poetry of Homer, to the history of Thucydides and the philoso- phy of Plato and Aristotle, was a prodigious step, but it was the native growth of the Hellenic youth into an Hellenic man ; and what is of still greater moment, it was brought about without breaking the thread either of religious or patriotic tradition without any coercive innovation or violent change in the mental feelings. The legendary world, though the ethical judgments and rational criticisms of superior men had outgrown it, still retained its hold upon their feelings as an object of affectionate and reve- rential retrospect. Far different from this was the development of the early Ger- mans. "We know little about their early poetry, but we shall run no risk of error in affirming that they had nothing to compare with either Iliad or Odyssey. Whether, if left to themselves, they would have possessed sufficient progressive power to make a step similar to that of the Greeks, is a question which we cannot answer. Their condition, mental as well as political, was violently changed by a foreign action from without. The in- fluence of the Roman empire introduced artificially among them new institutions, new opinions, habits, and luxuries, and, above all, a new religion; the Romanized Germans becoming them- selves successively the instruments of this revolution with regard to such of their brethren as still remained heathen. It was a revolution often brought about by penal and coercive means : th