as already gray with years
before the North had begun its infancy. Homer is the boundary which is
insurmountably opposed to our further retrospection, and Homer is
already the beginning of perfection in Greek letters. Of earlier periods
we can but conjecture that there must have been such, bearing a
character analogous to the relics of those nations whose fabulous
history is better known to us. Northern literature can hardly be said to
have had an existence till within the last hundred years. Before that
time we must look for all phases of progress and germs of progress in
the physical and animal character of the nation, their social and
political features and relations. The vividness and ideality of the
ancients find their natural change in the more purely impassioned style
of more modern Southern poetry. Their creations have naturally lost with
the fall of paganism, the supernatural endowments they had, and
retaining in some their ideality, they have hightened and fired the
human nature they depict by the addition of wilder and more flaming
passions, of love that consumes, and ambition, revenge, and hatred that
destroy. Thus we again obtain consistent characters governed by human
laws, but raised above the ordinary mass of men by different qualities
from those which ennobled ideal creations among the ancients. Repose
still constitutes greatness in some instances; but the inner man is made
all fire, and seething metal, ever-burning and quenchless. Elevation and
subtlety of ideas naturally follow these causes, they are another
natural growth of the simple ideality of conception.

The Northern character at the present day has very different qualities.
Though renowned for philosophical and metaphysical prose, yet their
poetry they require to deal with realities and not with ideas; it must
be clear as a fountain, and any opaqueness is an inexcusable flaw. They
are yet in the infancy of literature, and the imagination is still more
sensuous than acute and subtle. However much they court abstractions in
prose, in verse they love only the actual, the real, the tangible.
Nature, and not metaphysics, are the subjects of their poetry, and they
still preserve a freshness and simplicity reminding of more ancient and
ruder days, delightful amidst the hair-splitting of most modern poetry.
Their infancy is like the infancy of all national literatures,
peculiarly modified by the advanced state of civilization in which their
birth was