wealth of original tendencies, impulses, products. Think of what—to speak of forms of poetry only—we owe in their beginnings to the Greeks: epic poetry, lyric poetry, tragedy, comedy. These comprise nearly the whole of poetry, and these were not only initiated by the Hellenic people, but were brought to such completeness and perfection of growth that subsequent poetic achievement, at least in the ancient world, was hardly more than an intended imitation, or an unconscious echo, of the voices and notes of Hellas.
But originality is not enough. Originality, except in things themselves nobly worth while, may be a bane and not a benefit. The originality of the Greeks led to the production of works of poetic art which in themselves, on their own intrinsic merits, stand supreme. It is the manifold and universal excellence of the several kinds of Greek poetry—their perennial freshness, vigor, spontaneous vitality, their lucidity and their enkindling light—more than anything else that establishes the claim of Greek literature to its high place in the traditions and elements of civilization.
Greek literature—poetry, and to a certain extent prose also—has these peculiar excellences to so signal a degree, because it stood, as no other literature has since stood, in intimate relations with the whole of the life whence it sprung. Greek civilization had a solidarity and unity, and withal a noble simplicity, that gave to all parts and elements of it a vital interrelation and connection. Life, the whole life of the city-state, and sometimes of the whole nation, was the poet's inspirer, regulator, test. The poet was the consummate product, the epitome, as it were, of his age, not a wandering voice: he sang the true heart of
