Our ancestors were not prosaic. They were poetic in the truest sense of that word. Our life is divided between the child, the vigorous man, and old age,—the imaginative and prophetic child, the emotional and active man, and the reflecting elder. So a nation, which like the ancient Greek and Norse, for instance, has had a natural growth and development, has first its childhood of imagination and prophecy, producing poetry (Homer and the Eddas); then its manhood of emotion and activity, producing history (Herodotus and the Sagas); and then its old age of mature reflection, producing philosophy (Socrates). Dividing the three periods in Greek history more definitely, we will find that imagination and poetry predominated during the whole time before Solon; emotion, activity and history during the time between Solon and Alexander the Great; and then reflection and philosophy, such as they were, from Alexander to the collapse of the Greek states. Even among the Romans, the most prosaic of all peoples, that nation of subduers, enslavers and robbers, traces of this growth from poetic childhood through historic manhood to philosophic old age can be found, which proves moreover that this is a law of human development that cannot be eradicated, although it may be perverted. That of the Romans is a most distorted growth, showing that as the twig is bent the tree is inclined. _Ut sementem feceris, ita metes_—as you sow, so will you reap,—to quote the Romans’ own words against them. The Romans had their poetic and prophetic age during the reign of the seven kings; their emotional and historical age during the most prosperous and glorious epoch of the republic; and finally, their age of reflection and philosophy began with the time of the elder Cato. Rome took a distorted, misanthropic course from the beginning, so that her profoundest and most poetic myth is that of the _warlike_ Mars and the _rapacious wolf_, the father and nurse of the _fratricide_ Romulus. This myth is prophetic, and in it the whole history of Rome is reflected as in a mirror. The Romans themselves claim that their Sibylline books (prophecy) belong to the time of their kings. When, during the transition period from the emotional to the philosophic age, Rome was to have dramatic writers, she produced in comedy the clumsy Plautus, whom the Romans employed in turning a hand-mill; and in tragedy the flat Ennius, whose works were lost; so that her only really poetical tragedy is the fate of her dramatic poets. Her other poetical works, of which the world has boasted so much, came later, after the death of Cicero, their most famous orator, during the life of the crowned Augustus; they came like an Iliad after Homer, and the most of them was a poor imitation of Greek literature, just as this book is a poor imitation of Scandinavian literature. _Ex ipso fonte dulcius bibuntur aquæ_—go to the fountain itself if you want to drink the pure and sparkling water. The Roman