conquered Greece vanquished her rude conqueror
by art," the victory was primarily accomplished by elaborating from
the unpliant Latin idiom a cultivated and elevated poetical language,
so that instead of the monotonous and hackneyed Saturnian the senarius
flowed and the hexameter rushed, and the mighty tetrameters, the
jubilant anapaests, and the artfully intermingled lyrical rhythms
fell on the Latin ear in the mother-tongue. Poetical language is the
key to the ideal world of poetry, poetic measure the key to poetical
feeling; for the man, to whom the eloquent epithet is dumb and the
living image is dead, and in whom the times of dactyls and iambuses
awaken no inward echo, Homer and Sophocles have composed in vain.
Let it not be said that poetical and rhythmical feeling comes
spontaneously. The ideal feelings are no doubt implanted by nature
in the human breast, but they need favourable sunshine in order to
germinate; and especially in the Latin nation, which was but little
susceptible of poetic impulses, they needed external nurture. Nor let
it be said, that, by virtue of the widely diffused acquaintance with
the Greek language, its literature would have sufficed for the
susceptible Roman public. The mysterious charm which language
exercises over man, and which poetical language and rhythm only
enhance, attaches not to any tongue learned accidentally, but only
to the mother-tongue. From this point of view, we shall form a juster
judgment of the Hellenistic literature, and particularly of the
poetry, of the Romans of this period. If it tended to transplant
the radicalism of Euripides to Rome, to resolve the gods either into
deceased men or into mental conceptions, to place a denationalized
Latium by the side of a denationalized Hellas, and to reduce all
purely and distinctly developed national peculiarities to the
problematic notion of general civilization, every one is at liberty to
find this tendency pleasing or disagreeable, but none can doubt its
historical necessity. From this point of view the very defectiveness
of the Roman poetry, which cannot be denied, may be explained and
so may in some degree be justified. It is no doubt pervaded by a
disproportion between the trivial and often bungled contents and the
comparatively finished form; but the real significance of this poetry
lay precisely in its formal features, especially those of language and
metre. It was not seemly that poetry in Rome was principall