The marvellous and living mythology in the glorious old poetry of Greece justly occupies here the first place, for all arts, even the plastic arts, had their origin in this first Homeric source. And this fresh living stream of mythic fictions and heroic traditions which has flowed, and continues to flow, through all ages and nations in the West, proves to us, by a mighty historical experience, which determines even the most difficult problems (and this has been universally acknowledged in Christian Europe), that all classical education--all high intellectual refinement, is and should be grounded on poetry--that is to say, on a poetry which, like the Homeric, springs out of natural feelings, and embraces the world with a clear, intuitive glance. For there can be no comprehensive culture of the human mind,--no high and harmonious development of its powers, and the various faculties of the soul; unless all those deep feelings of life--that mighty, productive energy of human nature, the marvellous imagination, be awakened and excited, and by that excitement and exertion, attain an expansive, noble and beautiful form. This the experience of all ages has proved, and hence the glory of the Homeric poems, and of the whole intellectual refinement of the Greeks, which has thence sprung, has remained imperishable. Were the mental culture of any people founded solely on a dead, cold, abstract science, to the exclusion of all poetry; such a mere mathematical people--with minds thus sharpened and pointed by mathematical discipline, would and could never possess a rich and various intellectual existence; nor even probably ever attain to a living science, or a true science of life. The characteristic excellence of this Homeric poetry, and in general of all the Greek poetry, is that it observes a wise medium between the gigantic fictions of oriental imagination, even as the purer creations of Indian fancy display; and that distinctness of view, that broad knowledge and observation of the world, which distinguish the ages of prosaic narrative, when the relations of society become at once more refined and more complicated. In this poetry, these two opposite, and almost incompatible, qualities are blended and united--the fresh enthusiasm of the most living feelings of nature--a blooming, fertile, and captivating fancy, and a clear intuitive perception of life, are joined with a delicacy of tact, a purity and harmony of taste, excluding all exaggeration--all false ornament--and which few nations since the Greeks, none perhaps in an equal degree, certainly none before them, have ever possessed to a like extent.