Human reason is progressive chiefly by virtue of remembrance and language; hence were the Muses beautifully represented as being the daughters of Memory, the only power through which, in the infancy of letters, the harvests of thought could be garnered and preserved. The first national annals were cast under the patronage of the fair Nine, but the Muses of the great Dorian turned to the Ionic dialect as their most fitting vernacular. The civilization of Greece was the first that was unfolded by a natural growth, and its crowning bloom appeared only when every other portion of the wondrous plant had become perfectly matured. It awoke like a joyous infant, under the fairest heavens, and was nourished by all beautifying and ennobling influences. Its life was led apart from exhausting drudgery and effeminate ease, among fair festivals and solemn assemblies, full of healthful exhilaration, innocent curiosity, and confiding faith. Pindar preferred the Doric dialect to his native Æolic, in which many had sung. Like the other leaders of his race, he imitated his predecessors in nothing, but by inventing; he employed the form demanded by the nature of his art, and chose the language with certainty and care, which refused submission to the yoke of authority. The principle, that in each realm of art, whatever is accidental should be excluded, was thoroughly recognized in Greece, where even what fell in by accident, as the chorus of the drama, soon became entirely fused into the chief parts of the action, like an organic member of the whole. The singer of the Iliad was born under the sky of Ionia, and he molded his native dialect forever to epic poetry. The thoughtful Herodotus preferred the same language to the Doric, his native tongue, and employed the Ionic, which was just then putting forth its fairest buds of promise. Thus, the epos of history was twin-born with the epos of poetry. The wanderings of Ulysses, the Argonauts, and primitive heroes, embrace the whole extent of the then known or imagined world, the various manners, countries, and cities included. All these the great annalist works into the rich and variegated picture, which, like a moving panorama, he unfolds to the enraptured gaze. Minuteness, likeness, and strength were requisite as the medium of expression, and not in the old Doric, but in the new Ionic, were these found happily combined. Hence, in historical writing with the Greeks, as in every other department of art, we see that wonderful concord between the substance and the form, that harmony of inward and outward music, which is the first and most indispensable condition of beauty.