Page:The reflections of Lichtenberg.djvu/135

 EXCELLENCE in any branch of knowledge or art is so difficult to attain because it means the attainment of a certain fixed aim. To do a thing according to some prescribed rule badly would be just as difficultthat is to say, if to do it otherwise could still be called doing it badly. Rhyme is more characteristic of northern countries, just as rhythm used to be more honoured in the southern. In the latter melody is everything, in the former this is only occasionally so, but then here art and harmony are all the more apparent. I do not doubt but that the Greeks and Romans at times stumbled upon rhyme; its artificial character, however, must have been too pronounced for them and thus detestable; on the other hand, their sensitive ear was more alive to rhythm than ours, which therefore invented a perceptible rhythm, namely rhyme. Many of the old German poems have rhyme alone, and hardly any metre.

There is much truth in the observation that those who imitate too much weaken their own powers of invention. This is why Italian architecture declined. The man who imitates without perceiving the reasons