a susceptibility to literary excellence never equalled, [47] and a spirit responsive to the faintest echo of the music of the ages. [48] The very faculties that bar his entrance into the circle of creative minds enable him to stand first among those epic poets who own a literary rather than an original inspiration. For in truth epic poetry is a name for two widely different classes of composition. The first comprehends those early legends and ballads which arise in a nation's vigorous youth, and embody the most cherished traditions of its gods and heroes and the long series of their wars and loves. Strictly native in its origin, such poetry is the spontaneous expression of a people's political and religious life. It may exist in scattered fragments bound together only by unity of sentiment and poetic inspiration: or it may be welded into a whole by the genius of some heroic bard. But it can only arise in that early period of a nation's history when political combination is as yet imperfect, and scientific knowledge has not begun to mark off the domain of historic fact from the cloudland of fancy and legend. Of this class are the Homeric poems, the _Nibelungen Lied_, the Norse ballads, the _Edda_, the _Kalewâla_, the legends of Arthur, and the poem of the _Cid_: all these, whatever their differences, have this in common, that they sprang at a remote period out of the earliest traditions of the several peoples, and neither did nor could have originated in a state of advanced civilization. It is far otherwise with the other sort of epics. These are composed amid the complex influences of a highly developed political life. They are the fruit of conscious thought reflecting on the story before it and seeking to unfold its results according to the systematic rules of art. The stage has been reached which discerns fact from fable; the myths which to an earlier age seemed the highest embodiment of truth, are now mere graceful ornaments, or at most faint images of hidden realities. The state has asserted its dominion over man's activity; science, sacred and profane, has given its stores to enrich his mind; philosophy has led him to meditate on his place in the system of things. To write an enduring epic a poet must not merely recount heroic deeds, but must weave into the recital all the tangled threads which bind together the grave and varied interests of civilized man.