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greatest genius that makes Greece Greek,--save only Homer. So brief was
the noonday,--and it is at high noon, and high noon only, that men have
agreed to take the sun; but this uplift was gained in the ascent of nigh
two hundred years from the first written Greek literature that still
lives. The descent, to the last of the Greek verse which still remained
poetry, ran through thirteen centuries. Over all this prodigious span of
fifteen hundred years stretches the Greek Anthology, a collection of
4,063 short Greek poems, two to eight lines long for the most part,
collected and re-collected through more than a thousand years. The first
of these poets, Mimnermus, was the contemporary of Jeremiah, and dwelt
in cities that shuddered over tidings of Babylonian invasion. The last,
Cometas, was the contemporary of Edward the Confessor, and dreaded
Seljuk and Turk.

As the epic impulse faded, and before Greek genius for tragedy rose, the
same race and dialect which had given epic narrative the proud, full
verse that filled like a sail to zephyr and to storm alike, devised the
elegiac couplet. With its opening even flow, its swifter rush in the
second line, and its abrupt pause, it was a medium in which not
narrative but man spoke, whether personal in passion, or impersonal in
the dedication of a statue, or in epitaph. This verse had conventions as
rigorous and restrained as the sonnet, and was briefer. It served as
well for the epitaph of Thermopylae as for the cradle-bier of a child,
dead new-born; and lent itself as gracefully to the gift of a bunch of
roses as it swelled with some sonorous blast of patriotism. It could
sharpen to a gibe, or sink to a wail at untoward fate. Through a period
twice as long as the life of English letters, these short poems set
forth the vision of life, the ways and works of men, the love and death
of mortals. These lines of weight, of moment, always of grace and often
of inspiration, stood on milestones; they graced the base of statues;
they were inscribed on tombs; they stood over doorways; they were
painted on vases. The rustic shrines held them, and on the front of the
great temple they were borne. In this form, friend wrote to friend and
lover to lover. Four or five of the best express the emotion of the
passing Greek traveler at the statue of Memnon on the Nile. The quality
of verse that fills the inn album to-day we all know; but Greek life was
so compact of form and thought that even thi