Page:Hutcheson Macaulay Posnett - Comparative Literature (1886).djvu/62

 which invests with such intense feeling our "lyric" poetry of youth and age, which lingers over personal associations within the limits of its own time and space with a sadness almost inexpressible in the language of any group, and which watches the withering of its own passions and emotions with the conviction that "there's not a joy the world can give like that it takes away."

§ 13. Formal distinctions in literature often survive in the language of criticism into conditions totally different from those among which they arose. Our European criticism has in this way inherited from the Greeks such words as "epic," "lyric," "dramatic," which we have learned to bandy to and fro with astonishing facility. But though these words are so constantly on our lips that we have come to regard the ideas they generalise as not only permanent, but almost sufficiently concrete to be touched and handled, we rarely remember that the conceptions they denoted for Greeks differ greatly from those which we denote by the same names, that their meanings varied among the Greeks themselves at different stages of their civilisation, that among Greeks, as among ourselves, there were days when none of these literary forms existed, much less were distinguished inter se, and that there have been and are states of social life in which only some or even none of them have been either developed or named. As rarely is it remembered that other peoples