“Of this, modern poetry and fiction have abundantly availed themselves. But though a shadowy antiquity lay as a background to Greek and Roman civilisation, yet it was rarely resorted to by the ancient poets as a source of pleasing or solemn emotions. To them the remoter ages were little more than a desert abounding with monstrous fictions, with licentious and savage divinities, half-brutal demigods, and heroes, and chiefs hardly human, whose fabulous deeds and sufferings present nothing to recommend them to our sense of beauty. In the period following, history assumed at least an air of truth, and men appeared on the stage with human feelings, passions, and virtues. But, in looking back upon their earlier history, the ancients seem to have felt but slightly those peculiar sentiments and trains of feeling, which the contemplation of antiquity now awakens in our breasts. In no ancient poet is there a celebration of a hero of his country to be compared with Mrs Hemans’ lines on the Scottish patriot, Wallace, beginning
‘Rest with the brave, whose names belong
To the high sanctity of song.’
There is no appeal to the deeds of their fathers equal to her Spanish war-song—
‘Fling forth the proud banner of Leon again;
Let the high word “Castile” go resounding through Spain.’
No poetic conception of antiquity is to be found resembling the introduction of her ‘Cathedral Hymn’—
‘A dim and mighty minster of old time,
A temple, shadowy with remembrances
Of the majestic past!’