plausibility as connected with the corruption of their age. Had
that corruption availed so as to extinguish in them the sensibility to
pleasure, passion, and natural scenery, which is imputed to them as an
imperfection, the last triumph of evil would have been achieved. For
the end of social corruption is to destroy all sensibility to
pleasure; and, therefore, it is corruption. It begins at the
imagination and the intellect as at the core, and distributes itself
thence as a paralysing venom, through the affections into the very
appetites, until all become a torpid mass in which hardly sense
survives. At the approach of such a period, poetry ever addresses
itself to those faculties which are the last to be destroyed, and its
voice is heard, like the footsteps of Astraea, departing from the
world. Poetry ever communicates all the pleasure which men are capable
of receiving: it is ever still the light of life; the source of
whatever of beautiful or generous or true can have place in an evil
time. It will readily be confessed that those among the luxurious
citizens of Syracuse and Alexandria, who were delighted with the poems
of Theocritus, were less cold, cruel, and sensual than the remnant of
their tribe. But corruption must utterly have destroyed the fabric of
human society before poetry can ever cease. The sacred links of that
chain have never been entirely disjoined, which descending through
the minds of many men is attached to those great minds, whence as from
a magnet the invisible effluence is sent forth, which at once
connects, animates, and sustains the life of all. It is the faculty
which contains within itself the seeds at once of its own and of
social renovation. And let us not circumscribe the effects of the
bucolic and erotic poetry within the limits of the sensibility of
those to whom it was addressed. They may have perceived the beauty of
those immortal compositions, simply as fragments and isolated
portions: those who are more finely organized, or born in a happier
age, may recognize them as episodes to that great poem, which all
poets, like the co-operating thoughts of one great mind, have built up
since the beginning of the world.

The same revolutions within a narrower sphere had place in ancient
Rome; but the actions and forms of its social life never seem to have
been perfectly saturated with the poetical element. The Romans appear
to have considered the Greeks as the selectest treasuries of the
sele