The thought which it suggests is rather,—how wonderfully this language has achieved the purposes inherent in its own particular genius! It is an instrument which responds with happy elasticity to every demand of the Greek intellect. The forms which it has retained are light, graceful, flexible. It can express the most delicate shades of meaning with an elegant simplicity. This power is due, not only to its organic structure, but also to the tact with which words expressing the same general idea have been discriminated in its rich vocabulary. The Greek language is the earliest work of art created by the spontaneous working of the Greek mind, and it is the greatest work of Greek art which has survived. If those fragments of Greek architecture and sculpture which we so prize had come down to us without any credentials of their origin, simply as relics of an otherwise unknown race, it would not have been fantastic to conjecture that, of all the peoples recorded in history, the only one presumably capable of producing such monuments in marble was the same people whose thoughts had moulded, and whose spirit had chastened, the most perfect among the forms of human speech. The characteristic qualities of the Greek language are nowhere seen to greater advantage than in the Homeric poems, although the Homeric language has not yet fully developed certain special traits which the Attic dialect shows in perfection. We perceive in Homer how vividly this language bears the stamp of the imagination which has shaped it. The Greek saw the object of his
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