Page:The nature and elements of poetry, Stedman, 1892.djvu/130

100 of Athens he is no more self-intrusive than Molière, twenty centuries later, in his portraits of Tartuffe and Harpagon and "Les Précieuses." Men create poetry, yet sometimes poetry creates a man for us, witness our ideal of the world's Homer. The hearts of the Grecian dramatists were so much in their business (to use the French expression) that they have told us nothing of themselves; but this implies no insignificance. So reverse to commonplace, so individual were they each and all, that in point of fact we know from various sources more of their respective characters, ambitions, stations, than we know of that chief of dramatists who was buried at Stratford less than three centuries ago.

But I well may hesitate to discourse upon the Tribute to an American scholar. Greek and Latin poets to the pupils of an admired expounder of the classical literatures; and I use the word "literatures" advisedly, since, with all his philological learning, it is perhaps his greatest distinction to have led our return to sympathetic comprehension of the style and spirit of the antique masters,—to have applied, I may say, his genius not only to the materials in which they worked, but to the grace and power and plenitude of the structures wrought from those materials. With less hesitation, then, I change, in quest of strictly dramatic triumphs, from the time of Pericles to the period of Calderon, of Molière, of Shakespeare and his Elizabethan satellites. Lowell says that