s which they record, but they do not speak of them by
any rules of art, they are inspired to utter that to which the Muse
impels them, and that only."

All of which is true enough, but what it amounts to is this--that
artistic rules cannot invent the poetic thought and utterance; it does
not mean that the inventing Muse ever ignores the rules of art. And, as
a matter of fact, there never is, in Hellenic poetry, anything of utter
abandonment. There is reason, warmed and coloured by sentiment and
imagination, but reason is never imperilled by any conflagration of
emotion.

We began by saying that in all our modern thought and conduct we are
either more Hebraic or more Hellenic one than another. In what Carlyle
would call our heroes, in our writers, and in our own lives, the one
spirit or the other predominates. Happy, but exceeding rare, is he who
blends the best elements of both. Literature, perhaps, affords the
readiest means of illustration. Not every sentiment, it is true, of
modern European letters has been either distinctly Hellenic or
distinctly Hebraic in its character. The spirit of romantic poetry, and
of the poetry of nature, has no analogy in Greece or Palestine.
Nevertheless, inasmuch as no great European writer has failed to pass
under the moral influence of Christianity or of Judaism, or to feel
directly or indirectly the intellectual influence of Greece, we may, in
those great voices of a generation who are called its great writers,
listen for the differing tones of these differing forces, as betrayed
either in their substance or in their form.

It is not easy to select complete types of one or the other. Roughly,
perhaps, one might speak of the Hebraic Dante, Bunyan, or Carlyle; of
the Hellenic Johnson, Goethe or Tennyson: but one could not rightly draw
up two catalogues of authors and set them in contrast as perfect
embodiments, the one of Hebraism, the other of Hellenism. On the other
hand, it is not so difficult in the case of a great writer to
distinguish his Hebraic from his Hellenic moods and manners, and to
gather how far the one element or the other holds the chief sway in him.
That Dante's moral force is Hebraic is the natural and correct
impression of one who compares the _Divine Comedy_ with the _Odyssey_ of
Homer on the one side, and with the _Psalms_ or Isaiah on the other. Yet
even in Dante there is a certain repose of contemplation and a careful
justness of language which belong rather t