The necessary law of this poetry, down to the still indefinitely distant point where the great Epic of modern times, which hitherto has announced itself only rhapsodically and in broken glimpses, shall present itself as a perfect whole, is this:—that the individual gives shape and unity to that portion of the world which is revealed to him, and out of the materials of his time, its History and its Science, creates his own Mythology. For as the ancient world is, in general, the world of classes, so the modern is that of Individuals. In the former the Universal is in truth the particular, the race acts as an individual; in the latter, the Individual is the point of departure, and becomes the Universal. For this reason, in the former all things are permanent and imperishable: Number likewise is of no account, since the Universal idea coincides with that of the Individual;—in the latter, constant mutation is the fixed law; no narrow circle limits its ends, but one which through Individuality widens itself to infinitude. And since Universality belongs to the essence of Poetry, it is a necessary condition that the Individual through the highest peculiarity should again become universal, and by his complete speciality become again absolute. Thus through the perfect individuality and uniqueness of his Poem, Dante is the Creator of modern art, which without this arbitrary necessity, and necessary arbitrariness, cannot be imagined. From the very beginning of Greek Poetry, we see it clearly separated from Science and Philosophy, as in Homer, and this process of separation continued until the Poets and the Philosophers became the antipodes of each other. They in vain by allegorical interpretations of the Homeric Poems sought artificially to create a harmony between the two. In modern times Science has preceded Poetry and Mythology, which cannot be Mythology, without being universal and drawing into its circle all the elements of the then existing culture, Science, Religion and even Art, and joining in a perfect unity the material not only of the present but of the past. Into this struggle, (since Art demands something definite and limited, while the spirit of the world rushes towards the unlimited, and with ceaseless power sweeps down all barriers,) must the Individual enter, but with absolute freedom, seek to rescue permanent shapes from the fluctuations of time, and within arbitrarily assumed forms to give to the structure of his poem, by its absolute peculiarity, internal necessity and external universality.