Page:Masterpieces of Greek Literature (1902).djvu/28

xx Such was Greek poetry to the Greeks themselves in the classical age. What may it be to us? Has it a message for modern ears,—a message that we may spell out in the pages of this book of selections from Greek poetry,—and what is that message? We may answer this question in many ways, but mainly as students of human achievement and as lovers of the beautiful. The survivals of antiquity, especially the literature of Greece, interest us and should demand our devotion because they are the tokens and memorials of human life and spirit, brilliant, beautiful, powerful, pregnant in meaning for later times—it "contains the future as it came out of the past;"—memorials of memorable epochs, bright and happy moments in the history of humanity when the individual was at his best and uttered himself as seldom since, in spite—and perhaps because—of the vast enrichment and expansion of our modern world. As the man of science delights in nature because she speaks of herself, so the student of literature delights in the poetry of the Greeks because it reveals the soul of man in its radiant and wondrously gifted youth. And so when we are asked whether modem poetry has not much to offer that is better than Greek poetry, and are told that it suits our times, being ampler and deeper in sentiment, and at least equally happy in marrying sense and verse, we can only reply that the thoughtful really live in no one time above another; they are citizens of all time, and must find their own, what they need for the enlargement and awakening of their souls, in the poetry of Athens equally with that of Weimar and Paris and London and Boston. And to the second contention we can only answer that modern poetry is in no sense