Page:Masterpieces of Greek Literature (1902).djvu/22

xiv The thought is large and free and fine and enlightening, beholding the things of the spirit as they are, "steadily" and "whole," and the expression of the thought is as perfect as human speech can make it, helped as this expression here is by a language that is marvellous and unmatched in its power, delicacy, and range. Greek poetry is thus what Wordsworth says all poetry is,— Here is above all a noble originality. Practically everything in Greek poetry, forms of art and themes, and for that matter almost everything in European literature, is original in Greece, and so far as we know has no organic or derivative connection with anything outside of Greece, except now and then some minor matter or motif—as, perhaps, the strophic forms of poetry from the Babylonians and flute music from Phrygia. The Greeks inherited, it is true, from their ancestors certain poetic impulses and forms, but as Greek poetry dawns upon us in Homer it is something wonderfully in advance of the crude Indo-European beginnings such as we infer these to have been from Sanskrit literature. The Greeks borrowed, it is also true, but in borrowing they so transformed and recreated what they borrowed, transfiguring it into a larger life, that it seems to be and to the eye of the soul really is a new creation. The author of the Platonic Epinomis felt this truth, which finds illustration not only in literature but in all other forms of artistic expression, when he said, "Whatever the Greeks take over from the foreign world they fashion into something far more beautiful." Other nations have struck out on new lines in many things, but in none has the world ever beheld such a transcendent