Civil war, the spoils of Asia, and the fatal predominance, first of
the Macedonian, and then of the Roman arms, were so many symbols of
the extinction or suspension of the creative faculty in Greece. The
bucolic writers, who found patronage under the lettered tyrants of
Sicily and Egypt, were the latest representatives of its most glorious
reign. Their poetry is intensely melodious; like the odour of the
tuberose, it overcomes and sickens the spirit with excess of sweetness;
whilst the poetry of the preceding age was as a meadow-gale of June,
which mingles the fragrance of all the flowers of the field, and adds
a quickening and harmonizing spirit of its own which endows the sense
with a power of sustaining its extreme delight. The bucolic and erotic
delicacy in written poetry is correlative with that softness in
statuary, music, and the kindred arts, and even in manners and
institutions, which distinguished the epoch to which I now refer. Nor
is it the poetical faculty itself, or any misapplication of it, to
which this want of harmony is to be imputed.
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