nothing short of inspiring. To share the same lofty outlook, to
breathe the same high air with those who first sensed a whole era of
creative thoughts, is the next thing to being the gods' chosen medium
for those primal expressions.

All this is not to say that the epic is the oldest form of literary
expression, but it is the expression of the oldest literary ideas,
for, even when the epic is not at all primitive in form, it deals
essentially with elemental moods and ideals. Epical poetry is poetic
not because it is metrical and conformative to rhythmical
standards,--though it usually is both,--but it is poetry because of
the high sweep of its emotional outlook, the bigness of its thought,
the untamed passion of its language, and the musical flow of its
utterance.

Here, then, we have a veritable source book of the oldest ideas of the
race; but not only that--we are also led into the penetralia of the
earliest thought of many separate nations, for when the epic is
national, it is true to the earliest genius of the people whose spirit
it depicts.

To be sure, much of literature, and particularly the literature of the
epic, is true rather to the tone of a nation than to its literal
history--by which I mean that Achilles was more really a Greek hero
than any Greek who ever lived, because he was the apotheosis of Greek
chivalry, and as such was the expression of the Greeks rather than
merely a Greek. The Iliad and the Odyssey are not merely epics of
Greece--they are Greek.

This is an age of story-telling. Never before has the world turned so