(_αα_) Either of these poems, despite all that may be advanced to the contrary, is essentially self-complete, so definite and sensitive to its construction as a whole, that in my own opinion the very view which regards the present form of both as merely that in which they were sung and handed down to posterity by rhapsodists, simply amounts to little more than the just eulogy of such works in virtue of the fact that they are, with regard to the entire atmosphere of their content, national and realistic, and even in their particular parts are so consummately finished, that all and each of them may be taken as a whole in itself. Whereas in the East what is substantive[32] and universal in the poet's survey still impairs the individuality of character, and its aims and exploits by its symbolism or deliberate instruction, and thereby injures the definite articulation and unity of the whole. Here for the first time in these poems[33]we find a world beautifully suspended as it were between the general life-conditions of morality in family, state and religious belief, and the individuality of distinctive character, and in this fair balance between the claims of spirit and Nature, intentional action and objective event, between a national basis of enterprise and particular aims and deeds, even though individual heroes appear as the predominant feature in their free and animated movement, yet this too is so mediated by the distinctiveness of the aims proposed and the severe presence of destiny, that the entire exposition can only remain even for ourselves the _ne plus ultra_ of all attainment that we can either enjoy or admire in epic composition. For we find no difficulty here in recognizing the real significance of even the gods who withstand or assist these primitive masculine heroes in their bravery, their straightforward and noble actions: nor can we fail to return the merry smiles of an art which depicts them as we see them here in all the _naïveté_ of their very human, if also godlike impersonations. (_ββ_) The _cyclic_ poets of an age subsequent to the Homeric poems depart more and more from this genuine type of epic poetry. On the one hand the tendency here is to break up the completeness of the national world-survey into its petty provinces and aspects; and from another point of view, instead of retaining a firm grasp of the poetic unity and distinctive character of an individual action, to insist more exclusively on the completeness of events as an historical series, or on the unity of the personality, and by so doing to assimilate epic poetry with the already emphasized historical impulse of the logographers in their historical compilations.