Pagina 467 di 1391

Then the tale of love might begin again in poetry or prose, two

in one, united in the pursuit of knowledge, or the service of God

and man; and feelings of love might still be the incentive to

great thoughts and heroic deeds as in the days of Dante or

Petrarch; and many types of manly and womanly beauty might appear

among us, rising above the ordinary level of humanity, and many

lives which were like poems (Laws), be not only written, but

lived by us. A few such strains have been heard among men in the

tragedies of Aeschylus and Sophocles, whom Plato quotes, not, as

Homer is quoted by him, in irony, but with deep and serious

approval,-in the poetry of Milton and Wordsworth, and in passages

of other English poets,-first and above all in the Hebrew

prophets and psalmists.