e prince of poets; he celebrated
the siege of Troy in the Iliad and Odyssey, two epic poems which have
never been surpassed. In the same kind of composition he was followed,
nine hundred years after, by Virgil, in the Eneid; by Tasso, after
another fifteen hundred years, in the 'Jerusalem Delivered.' The
Greeks also boasted of their Pindar and Anacreon in lyric poetry; and
of Aristophanes, Euripides, Sophocles, and Eschylus, in dramatic
poetry.

Did the Romans possess any distinguished Poets?

Yes; among the epic poets were Ovid and Tibullus; among dramatists,
Plautus and Terence; of didactic and philosophic poets, Lucretius,
Virgil, Horace, and Silius Italicus. All these were so many miracles
of human genius; and their works afford the models of their respective
species of composition. Most of the works of the ancients have in
sentiment, if not in spirit, been translated into English.

_Miracles_, wonders.

_Genius_, natural talent.

_Respective_, particular.

_Sentiment_, thought, meaning.

Did not the same revolution which undermined the Greek and Roman
empires, and destroyed learning, the arts and sciences, and the taste
for elegance and luxury, also prove fatal to Poetry?

It did; the hordes of barbarians who overran Europe wiped out
civilization in their progress, and literature, art, and science fled
before the wild conquerors to find a refuge in the monastery and the
convent. Here knowledge was fostered with the love and ardor which
religion alone can impart. Finally, when the rude barbarians were
converted, it was to the religious Orders that the world turned for
the establishment of schools, and it is to the Church alone, in the
person of her popes, her bishops, and her monks that we are indebted
for the preservation of learning, and its revival in the fifteenth
century.

What celebrated Poets marked this revival?

In Italy, Dante, Ariosto, Petrarch and Tasso. These were followed, in
France, by Racine, Corneille, Boileau, Voltaire, La Fontaine and
Delille; in England, by Chaucer, Spenser, Shakspeare, Milton, Dryden,
Pope, Thomson, Young, Collins, Gray, Byron, Coleridge, &c; in
Scotland, by Sir Walter Scott; in Ireland, by Thomas Moore; in
Germany, Klopstock, Goethe and Schiller.

Name some of the distinguished poets of our own country.

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, William Cullen Bryant, James Russell
Lowell, John G. Whittier, Fitz-Greene Halleck, and many others whos