The true poetic imagination is of one quality, whether it be ancient or
modern, and equally subject to those laws of grace, of proportion, of
design, in whose free service, and in that alone, it can become art.
Those laws are something which do not
"Alter when they alteration find,
And bend with the remover to remove."
And they are more clearly to be deduced from the eminent examples of
Greek literature than from any other source. It is the advantage of this
select company of ancients that their works are defecated of all turbid
mixture of contemporaneousness, and have become to us pure _literature_,
our judgment and enjoyment of which cannot be vulgarized by any
prejudices of time or place. This is why the study of them is fitly
called a liberal education, because it emancipates the mind from every
narrow provincialism whether of egoism or tradition, and is the
apprenticeship that every one must serve before becoming a free brother
of the guild which passes the torch of life from age to age. There would
be no dispute about the advantages of that Greek culture which Schiller
advocated with such generous eloquence, if the great authors of antiquity
had not been degraded from teachers of thinking to drillers in grammar,
and made the ruthless pedagogues of root and inflection, instead of
companions for whose society the mind must put on her highest mood.
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