their own condition, whilst it should bear a general one to the
universal constitution of the world. But we judge from partial
evidence, and we judge perhaps partially Ennius, Varro, Pacuvius,
and Accius, all great poets, have been lost. Lucretius is in the
highest, and Virgil in a very high sense, a creator. The chosen
delicacy of expressions of the latter, are as a mist of light which
conceal from us the intense and exceeding truth of his conceptions
of nature. Livy is instinct with poetry. Yet Horace, Catullus,
Ovid, and generally the other great writers of the Virgilian age,
saw man and nature in the mirror of Greece. The institutions also,
and the religion of Rome were less poetical than those of Greece,
as the shadow is less vivid than the substance. Hence poetry in
Rome, seemed to follow, rather than accompany, the perfection of
political and domestic society. The true poetry of Rome lived in
its institutions; for whatever of beautiful, true, and majestic,
they contained, could have sprung only from the faculty which creates
the order in which they consist. The life of Camillus, the death of
Regulus; the expectation of the senators, in their godlike state,
of the victorious Gauls: the refusal of the republic to make peace
with Hannibal, after the battle of Cannae, were not the consequences
of a refined calculation of the probable personal advantage to
result from such a rhythm and order in the shows of life, to those
who were at once the poets and the actors of these immortal dramas.
The imagination beholding the beauty of this order, created it out
of itself according to its own idea; the consequence was empire,
and the reward everliving fame. These things are not the less poetry
quid carent vate sacro. They are the episodes of that cyclic poem
written by Time upon the memories of men. The Past, like an inspired
rhapsodist, fills the theatre of everlasting generations with their
harmony.