here is inspiration
in them.

And now comes the point I have fetched all this compass to arrive
at. By Spenser's time, or earlier, in England, all traces of
Chaucer's French accent had gone; the language and the poetry
had developed on lines of their own, as true expressions of the
national soul. But in Rome, not so. Two centuries later great
Roman poetry was being written: a major poet was on the scenes,
--Virgil. He, I am certain, wrote with genuine music and
inspiration. We have accounts of his reading of his own poems;
how he was carried along by the music, chanting the lines in a
grand voice that thrilled all who heard. He chanted, not spoke,
them; poets always do. They formed themselves, grew in his
mind, to a natural music already heard there, and existent before
the words arose and took shape to it. That music is the creative
force at work, the whirr of the loom of the Eternal; it is the
golden-snooded Muses at song. And therefore he was not, like
Ennius, making up his lines on an artificial foreign plan; to my
mind that is unthinkable;--he was writing in the Latin spoken by
the cultured; in Latin as all cultured Romans spoke it. But,
_mirabile dictu,_ it was Latin as Ennius had composed it: he was
writing in Ennius' meter. I can only understand that Greek had
so swamped the Latin soul, that for a century or more cultured
Latin had been spoken in quantity, not in accent; in the Greek
manner, and with the Greek rhythm. Ennius had come to be
appreciable as meter and music to Roman ears; which he certainly
could not have been in his own day.

So we may say that there is in a sense no Roman literature at
all. Nothing grew out of the old Saturnian ballad-meter,--except
perhaps Catullus, who certainly had no high inspiring impersonal
song to sing. The Roman soul never grew up, never learned to
express itself in its own way; before it had had time to do so,
the Greek impulse that should have quickened it, swamped it. You
may think of Japan, swamped by Chinese culture in the sixth
century A.D., as a parallel case; but no; there Buddhism, under
real spiritual Teachers, came in at the same time, and fostered
all that was noblest in the Japanese soul, so that the result was
fair and splendid. A more cognate case is that of the Turks, who
suffered through suddenly conquering Persia while they were still
barbarous, and taking on, outwardly, Persian culture wholesale;
Turkish and Latin literature are pe