If you bring up your children in a way which puts them out of sympathy with the religious feelings of the nation in which they live, the chances are, that they will ultimately turn out ruffians or fanatics—and one as likely as the other.
October 23. 1833.
ELEGY.—LAVACRUM PALLADOS.—GREEK AND LATIN PENTAMETER.—MILTON'S LATIN POEMS.—POETICAL FILTER.—GRAY AND COTTON.
Elegy is the form of poetry natural to the reflective mind. It may treat of any subject, but it must treat of no subject for itself; but always and exclusively with reference to the poet himself. As he will feel regret for the past or desire for the future, so sorrow and love become the principal themes of elegy. Elegy presents every thing as lost and gone, or absent and future. The elegy is the exact opposite of the Homeric epic, in which all is purely external and objective, and the poet is a mere voice.
The true lyric ode is subjective too; but then it delights to present things as actually existing and visible, although associated with the past, or coloured highly by the subject of the ode itself.
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I think the Lavacrum Pallados of Callimachus very beautiful indeed, especially that part about the mother of Tiresias and Minerva.[1] I have a mind to try how it would bear translation; but what metre have we to answer in feeling to the elegiac couplet of the Greeks?
I greatly prefer the Greek rhythm of the short verse to Ovid's, though, observe, I don't dispute his taste with reference to the genius of his own language. Augustus Schlegel gave me a copy of Latin elegiacs on the King of Prussia's going down the Rhine, in which he had almost exclusively adopted the manner of Propertius. I thought them very elegant.
[Footnote 1: Greek: Paides, Athanaia numphan mian en poka Th_ezais po_olu ti kai pezi d_e philato tan hetezan, mateza Teizesiao, kai oupoka ch_ozis egento k.t.l. v 57, &c.]
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