Page:Hesiod, and Theognis.djvu/140

126 with the subjects of each hymn in succession are tricked out with poetic devices very alien to the more direct muse of Hesiod; and though Callimachus professes to record the speeches of Zeus and Artemis, and to divine the thoughts and feelings that animate the Olympians, his readers cannot help feeling that he lacks the "afflatus" in which Hesiod implicitly believed and which, though it suited the sceptical Lucian to twit as assumed, and unattended by results, certainly imparts an air of earnestness to his poetry. Furthermore—and this is the plainest note of difference—the hymns of Callimachus have little or no pretence to be "genealogies,"—a form of poetry, to say the truth, not sufficiently attractive to please an advanced stage of literary cultivation, and a form, too, that lacks any memorable imitation in Latin poetry. To glance at our own poetic literature, the nearest approach to the form and scope of the 'Theogony' is to be found, it strikes us, in Drayton's 'Polyolbion,' a poem characterised by the same endeavour to systematise a vast mass of information, and to genealogise, so to speak, the British hills, and woods, and rivers, which are personified in it.

Drayton, it cannot be denied, has infinitely more fancy, and lightens the burden of his accumulated detail by much greater liveliness and idealism; yet it is impossible not to be struck also with his enumeration of the streams and mountains of a given district, each invested with a personality, each for the nonce regarded as of kin to its fellow, as a singular revival of Hesiod's