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Untitled Article
scholarship cannot alone supply the want ; the most exact grammatical interpretation sets before us but the skeleton of the poet ' s thought ; it is only by throwing ourselves back into the poet ' s age , and reviving the scenes and feelings which furnished his inspiration , that we can clothe it with flesh , and breathe into it the spirit of its original vitality . In a passage , which we have not room to quote , Herder has some beautiful remarks on this subject—in reference to the choral songs of Aristophanes and the tragedians , and the triumphal odes of Pindar *; and what he there expresses every one must have felt , who has endeavoured
to realise to himself through the medium of the original , the native force and freshness of those truly national effusions of the Grecian muse . The gorgeous accumulation of splendid epithets * heaped one upon another with lavish prodigality , perpetually shifting and gleaming on the mental eye , like a train of painted clouds , and discovering at every turn , amidst partial obscurity ; the hidden brightness which irradiates them , yet impressing * after
the most careful elucidation , nothing like a distinct picture on the imagination ; all this , so peculiar to the choral poesy of the Greeks , and so strongly expressive of the wildness of its dithyrambs origin , was anciently distilled into the eats of listening crowds with the sweetness of the most exquisite rhythmus , and awoke into responsive harmony the thousand chords of religious and patriotic association , over which the soft sighing of its music swept . But for us , these magic influences are all past and gone ;
the words indeed are there , but the spirit which warmed them is fled ; and , as Herder beautifully expresses it ^ only the shade * of a departed beauty remains . Poetry is the earliest expression of the language of mankindthe form , in which the first rude conceptions , the first wild conjectures , the simplest , deepest , and most natural feelings of unfolding humanity develop themselves : poetry is succeeded by philosophy ; and in their philosophy , as in their poetry , the free spirit of the Greeks is conspicuous . Amongst them we see no extensive sects , as in Asia , holding immense multitudes in implicit subjection to the doctrines of their founder , and transmitting these doctrines with unimpaired authority from one generation to another ; but every individual exercised the greatest freedom of thought and speech upon the various topics which then came
within the circle of philosophy , and , even in attaching himself to some particular teacher , only assumed a position of hostility towards other schools , and involved himself in endless disputation * The very extreme to which the Sophists carried their taste for wrangling , and which justly drew down on them the sarcastic rebukes of Socrates , clearly marks the tendency of the Grecian mind «—contrasts it most forcibly with the hereditary torpor of the count-* Book XIII ., ciuii ., 1 . 141 , f SchatteJwrerk ,
Untitled Article
The Philosophy of the nUtoty of ManUni . 175
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Citation
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Monthly Repository (1806-1838) and Unitarian Chronicle (1832-1833), March 2, 1832, page 175, in the Nineteenth-Century Serials Edition (2008; 2018) ncse.ac.uk/periodicals/mruc/issues/vm2-ncseproduct1808/page/31/
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