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[4452,1]  We are so thoroughly dependent on the age to which we belong, we subsist so much in and through it as parts of a whole, that the same thought is at one time sufficient to give us a measure for the acuteness, depth, and strength of the intellect which conceives it, while at another it suggests itself to all, and nothing but accident leads one to give it utterance before others. Perizonius knew of heroic lays only from books; that he should ever have heard of any then still current, or written down from the mouth of the common people, is not conceivable of his days: he lived long enough to hear, perhaps he heard, but not until a quarter of a century had passed since the appearance of his researches, how Addison (sic) roused the stupefied senses of his {literary} contemporaries, to join with the common people in recognizing the pure gold of poetry in Chevy-chase * {(V. Τhe Spectator's N.os 70. 74.)} For us the heroic lays of Spain, Scotland, and Scandinavia, had long been a common stock: the lay of the Niebelungen had already returned and taken its place in literature: * (l'autore, p. 196. the German national epic poem, the Niebelungen lay. * ) and now that we listen to the Servian lays, and to those of Greece, * (raccolti da Fauriel, che l'autore cita più volte), the swanlike strains of a slaughtered nation; now that every one knows that poetry lives in every people, until metrical forms, foreign models, the various and multiplying interests of every-day life, general dejection or luxury, stifle it so, that of the poetical spirits, still more than of all others, very few find vent: while on the contrary spirits without poetical genius, but with talents so analogous to it that they may serve as a  4453 substitute, frequently usurp the art; now the empty objections that have been raised no longer need any answer. Whoever does not discern such lays in the epical part of Roman story, may continue blind to them: he will be left more and more alone every day: there can be no going backward on this point for generations. *

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