But we judge from partial evidence, and we judge perhaps
partially. Ennius, Varro, Pacuvius, and Accius, all great poets, have
been lost. Lucretius is in the highest, and Virgil in a very high
sense, a creator. The chosen delicacy of expressions of the latter are
as a mist of light which conceal from us the intense and exceeding
truth of his conceptions of nature. Livy is instinct with poetry. Yet
Horace, Catullus, Ovid, and generally the other great writers of the
Virgilian age, saw man and nature in the mirror of Greece. The
institutions also, and the religion of Rome, were less poetical than
those of Greece, as the shadow is less vivid than the substance. Hence
poetry in Rome seemed to follow, rather than accompany, the perfection
of political and domestic society. The true poetry of Rome lived in
its institutions; for whatever of beautiful, true, and majestic they
contained, could have sprung only from the faculty which creates the
order in which they consist. The life of Camillus, the death of Regulus;
the expectation of the senators, in their godlike state, of the
victorious Gauls; the refusal of the republic to make peace with
Hannibal after the battle of Cannae, were not the consequences of a
refined calculation of the probable personal advantage to result from
such a rhythm and order in the shows of life, to those who were at
once the poets and the actors of these immortal dramas.
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