not ascend to bring light and fire from those eternal regions where the owl-winged faculty of calculation dare not ever soar? … These and corresponding conditions of being are experienced principally by persons of the most delicate sensibility and the most enlarged imagination; and the state of mind produced by them is at war with every base desire. The enthusiasm of virtue, love, patriotism, and friendship is essentially linked with such emotions; and while they last self appears as what it is, an atom to a universe. The most unfailing herald, companion, and follower of the awakening of a great people to work a beneficial change in opinion or institution is poetry. At such periods there is an accumulation of the power of communicating and receiving intense and impassioned conceptions respecting man and nature."
The periods which followed the fall of Athens in Greece were eminently unfavourable to this unity of social feelings which forms the groundwork of imagination and poetry. The break-up of social ties and the substitution of action from self-interest had resulted from the decay of old Athenian morality at the touch of associations far wider than early Athens had ever known; and now, when her political power was reduced, expansion of social and political ideas as a matter of theory continued. In three different directions the improvement of prose, the proper vehicle of philosophic individualism, was being carried on, The practical oratory of the law-court and assembly was being advanced to a perfection which in Demosthenes, the last great representative of practical Athenian politics, attained its highest point. The art of speech-making, in the hands of the cosmopolitan theorist Isokrates, had established the normal shape of Greek prose. In the dialogues of Plato the destructive logic
