This heroic age must pass away. It is sustained, while it lasts, by special influences which can not have place in the common life and ordinary work of humanity. Its continuance, therefore, would be inconsistent with other benefits and other improvements of a more sober or less exciting kind, but which, nevertheless, belong to the proper development of the state. The deep effects, however, still remain. It inspires the poet and the orator. It furnishes the historian with his richest page. It tinges the whole current of the national literature. In fact, there can be no such thing as a national literature, in its truest sense--there can be no national poetry, no true national art, no national music, except as more or less intimately connected with the spirit of such a period. It was not the genius of democracy simply, as Grote and some other historians maintain, but the heroic remembrances of the Persian invasion, that roused the Grecian mind, and created the brilliant period of the Grecian civilization. The new energy that came from this period was felt in every department--of song, of eloquence, of art, and even of philosophy. Marathon and Salamis still sustained the national life when it was waning under the mere political wisdom of Pericles, the factious recklessness of Alcibiades, and the still more debasing influence of the venal demagogues of later times. When this old spirit had gone out, there was nothing in the mere forms of her free institutions that could prevent Athens from sinking down into insignificance, or from being absorbed in the growth of new and rising powers.