Latin, also, to continue the same metaphor, has other characteristic features of hard substances—gravity, solidity, and momentum or energy. It is a fit language for embodying and expressing the thoughts of an active and practical but not an imaginative and speculative people. But the Latin language, notwithstanding its nervous energy and constitutional vigour, has, by no means, exhibited the permanency and vitality of the Greek. The Greek language, reckoning from the earliest works extant to the present day, boasts of an existence measured by nearly one-half the duration of the human race, and yet how gradual were the changes during the classical periods, and how small, when compared with those of other European languages, the sum and result of them all! Setting aside the differences due to race and physical organization, there are no abrupt chasms, no broad lines of demarkation, between one literary period and another. The transition is gentle, slow, and gradual. The successive steps can be traced and followed out. The literary style of one period melts and is absorbed into that of the following one, just like the successive tints and colours of the prism. The Greek of the Homeric poems is not so different from that of Herodotus and Thucydides, or the tragedians or the orators, or even the authors of the later debased ages, but that the same scholar who understands the one can analyze the rest. Though separated by so many ages, the contemporaries of Demosthenes could appreciate the beauties of Homer; and the Byzantines and early Christian fathers wrote and spoke the language of the ancient Greek philosophers.