fascination and horror with which Michelangelo will embellish the Vatican, in those awe-inspiring represervations of the fall of man which Rubens will throw upon the arches of the Cathedral of Antwerp.  The time has come when the balance between the two principles is to be established.  A man, a poet-king, poeta soverano, as Dante calls Homer, is about to adjust everything.  The two rival genii combine their flames, and thence issues Shakespeare.

We have now reached the poetic culmination of modern times.  Shakespeare is the drama; and the drama, which with the same breath moulds the grotesque and the sublime, the terrible and the absurd, tragedy and comedy—­the drama is the distinguishing characteristic of the third epoch of poetry, of the literature of the present day.

Thus, to sum up hurriedly the facts that we have noted thus far, poetry has three periods, each of which corresponds to an epoch of civilization:  the ode, the epic, and the drama.  Primitive times are lyrical, ancient times epical, modern times dramatic.  The ode sings of eternity, the epic imparts solemnity to history, the drama depicts life.  The characteristic of the first poetry is ingenuousness, of the second, simplicity, of the third, truth.  The rhapsodists mark the transition from the lyric to the epic poets, as do the romancists that from the lyric to the dramatic poets.  Historians appear in the second period, chroniclers and critics in the third.  The characters of the ode are colossi—­Adam, Cain, Noah; those of the epic are giants—­Achilles, Atreus, Orestes; those of the drama are men—­Hamlet, Macbeth, Othello.  The ode lives upon the ideal, the epic upon the grandiose, the drama upon the real.  Lastly, this threefold poetry flows from three great sources—­The Bible, Homer, Shakespeare.

Such then—­and we confine ourselves herein to noting a single result—­such are the diverse aspects of thought in the different epochs of mankind and of civilization.  Such are its three faces, in youth, in manhood, in old age.  Whether one examines one literature by itself or all literatures en masse, one will always reach the same result:  the lyric poets before the epic poets, the epic poets before the dramatic poets.  In France, Malherbe before Chapelain, Chapelain before Corneille; in ancient Greece, Orpheus before Homer, Homer before AEschylus; in the first of all books, Genesis before Kings, Kings before Job; or to come back to that monumental scale of all ages of poetry, which we ran over a moment since, The Bible before the Iliad, the Iliad before Shakespeare.

In a word, civilization begins by singing of its dreams, then narrates its doings, and, lastly, sets about describing what it thinks.  It is, let us say in passing, because of this last, that the drama, combining the most opposed qualities, may be at the same time full of profundity and full of relief, philosophical and picturesque.