re their eyes and whose spirit they shared. They simply
transferred what was passing in the world around them to the realm of
re-presentative intellect; an external phenomenon was thus translated
into an internal conception. In the same way the poet operates upon the
material supplied him by his emotions, projecting it into an image for
the conceptive faculty.

These original historians did, it is true, find statements and
narratives of other men ready to hand; one person cannot be an
eye-and-ear witness of everything. But, merely as an ingredient, they
make use only of such aids as the poet does of that heritage of an
already-formed language to which he owes so much; historiographers bind
together the fleeting elements of story, and treasure them up for
immortality in the temple of Mnemosyne. Legends, ballad-stories, and
traditions must be excluded from such original history; they are but dim
and hazy forms of historical apprehension, and therefore belong to
nations whose intelligence is but half awakened. Here, on the contrary,
we have to do with people fully conscious of what they were and what
they were about. The domain of reality--actually seen, or capable of
being so-affords a very different basis in point of firmness from that
fugitive and shadowy element in which were engendered those legends and
poetic dreams whose historical prestige vanishes as soon as nations have
attained a mature individuality.

Such original historians, then, change the events, the deeds, and the
states of society with which they are conversant, into an object for the
conceptive faculty; the narratives they leave us cannot, therefore, be
very comprehensive in their range. Herodotus, Thucydides, Guicciardini,
may be taken as fair samples of the class in this respect. What is
present and living in their environment is their proper material. The
influences that have formed the writer are identical with those which
have molded the events that constitute the matter of his story. The
author's spirit and that of the actions he narrates are one and the
same. He describes scenes in which he himself has been an actor, or at
any rate an interested spectator. It is short periods of time,
individual shapes of persons and occurrences, single, unreflected
traits, of which he makes his picture. And his aim is nothing more than
the presentation to posterity of an image of events as clear as that
which he himself possessed in virtue of personal observati