(_b_) In the case of the second principal division of our present poetic type, that is in the Lyric of the Greeks and Romans, it is the principle of _classic_ individuality which, above all, distinguishes its character. In accordance with this principle, the artistic consciousness, which seeks for lyrical expression, neither loses itself in the facts of the natural world, nor exalts itself over itself to the height of that Sublime outcry to all creation: "Let all that hath breath praise the Lord!" Nor is it absorbed, after divesting itself joyfully from all the bonds of finite existence, in that One Being in which all live and move. Rather the poet here is freely merged in the Universal, regarded as the very substance of his own spirit; and in this personal union within himself attains his self-conscious poetic activity. And just as the Lyric of the Greeks and Romans is distinct from that of the _Orientals_, so too, from another point of view, it differs from the _romantic._ In other words, instead of unveiling its depths in the intimacy of particular moods and states of feeling, it rather elaborates, to the point of the most explicit definition, this inward life of its individual passion and meditation. And by doing so it even retains, even as the expression of this inward spirit, so far as this is permitted to the Lyric, the plastic type of classic art. All that it communicates, in short, of the views and maxims of life and wisdom, despite all the penetration of its general principle, nevertheless does not dispense with the free individuality of independent thought and conception. It expresses itself less in the wealth of image and metaphor, than directly and categorically. At the same time, also, the personal feeling, at one time in more general relations, at another in the form of vision itself, is on its own account objective. In the same mode of individuality the particular types may be classified as distinct from each other in conception, expression, phraseology, and verse-measure, until they reach the culminating point of their independent elaboration. And as we have found it true of the soul itself and its ideas, so, too, the external presentment is of more plastic type. In other words, from a musical point or view, it emphasizes less the ideal soul-melody of emotion than the sensuous verbal quantity in the rhythmical measure of its movement, to which it may further attach the complex mazes of the dance.