ramatic excellence; and that the corruption or the extinction
of the drama in a nation where it has once flourished, is a mark of a
corruption of manners, and an extinction of the energies which sustain
the soul of social life. But, as Machiavelli says of political
institutions, that life may be preserved and renewed, if men should
arise capable of bringing back the drama to its principles. And this
is true with respect to poetry in its most extended sense: all
language, institution and form, require not only to be produced but to
be sustained: the office and character of a poet participates in the
divine nature as regards providence, no less than as regards creation.

Civil war, the spoils of Asia, and the fatal predominance first of the
Macedonian, and then of the Roman arms, were so many symbols of the
extinction or suspension of the creative faculty in Greece. The
bucolic writers, who found patronage under the lettered tyrants of
Sicily and Egypt, were the latest representatives of its most glorious
reign. Their poetry is intensely melodious; like the odour of the
tuberose, it overcomes and sickens the spirit with excess of
sweetness; whilst the poetry of the preceding age was as a meadow-gale
of June, which mingles the fragrance of all the flowers of the field,
and adds a quickening and harmonizing spirit of its own, which endows
the sense with a power of sustaining its extreme delight. The bucolic
and erotic delicacy in written poetry is correlative with that
softness in statuary, music, and the kindred arts, and even in manners
and institutions, which distinguished the epoch to which I now refer.
Nor is it the poetical faculty itself, or any misapplication of it, to
which this want of harmony is to be imputed. An equal sensibility to
the influence of the senses and the affections is to be found in the
writings of Homer and Sophocles: the former, especially, has clothed
sensual and pathetic images with irresistible attractions. Their
superiority over these succeeding writers consists in the presence of
those thoughts which belong to the inner faculties of our nature, not
in the absence of those which are connected with the external: their
incomparable perfection consists in a harmony of the union of all. It
is not what the erotic poets have, but what they have not, in which
their imperfection consists. It is not inasmuch as they were poets,
but inasmuch as they were not poets, that they can be considered with
any