A man possessed of splendid talents, which he often abused, and of a sound judgment, the admonitions of which he often neglected; a man who succeeded only in an inferior department of his art, but who in that department succeeded pre-eminently.
By poetry we mean the art of employing of words in such a manner as to produce an illusion on the imagination; the art of doing by means of words, what the painter does by means of colors.
In the infancy of civilization, when our island was as savage as New Guinea, when letters and arts were still unknown to Athens, when scarcely a thatched roofed hut stood on what was later the site of Rome, this contemned people had their fenced cities and cedar palaces, their splendid Temple, their fleets of merchant ships, their schools of sacred learning, their great statesmen and soldiers, their natural philosophers, their historians and their poets.
So true it is, that nature has caprices which art cannot imitate.
A Grecian history, perfectly written should be a complete record of the rise and progress of poetry, philosophy, and the arts.
In taste and imagination, in the graces of style, in the arts of persuasion, in the magnificence of public works, the ancients were at least our equals.
