Ionian Language and Culture.

"The Ionian dialect, remoulded from the Asiatic forms and elements
which had traveled through the North and recrossed the AEgean Sea,
under the happy influences of a serene and beautiful heaven, amid
the most varied and lovely scenery in nature, by a people of manly
vigor and exquisite mental and physical organization--of the
keenest susceptibility to beauty of sound as well as of form, of
the most vivid and creative imagination, combined with a childlike
impulsiveness and simplicity--this Ionian language, so sprung and
so nurtured, attained a descriptive force, a copiousness and
harmony, which made it the most admirable instrument on which
poet ever played. For every mood of mind, every shade of passion,
every affection of the heart, every form and aspect of the outward
world, it had its graphic phrase, its clear, appropriate, and
rich expression. Its pictured words and sentences placed the
things described, and thoughts that breathe, in living form
before the reader's eye and mind. It was vivid, rich, melodious;
in its general character strikingly concrete and objective; a
charm to the ear, a delight to the imagination; copious and
infinitely flexible; free and graceful in movement and structure,
having at the beginning passed over the chords of the lyre, and
been modulated by the living voice of the singer; obeying the
impulse of thought and feeling, rather than the formal principles
of grammar.

"It expressed the passions of robust manhood with artless and
unconscious truth. Its freedom, its voluble minuteness of