It would be logical to add here that everything in nature and in life passes through these three phases, the lyric, the epic, and the dramatic, because everything is born, acts, and dies.  If it were not absurd to confound the fantastic conceits of the imagination with the stern deductions of the reasoning faculty, a poet might say that the rising of the sun, for example, is a hymn, noon-day a brilliant epic, and sunset a gloomy drama wherein day and night, life and death, contend for mastery.  But that would be poetry—­folly, perhaps—–­ and what does it prove?

Let us hold to the facts marshalled above; let us supplement them, too, by an important observation, namely that we have in no wise pretended to assign exclusive limits to the three epochs of poetry, but simply to set forth their predominant characteristics.  The Bible, that divine lyric monument, contains in germ, as we suggested a moment ago, an epic and a drama—­_-Kings_ and Job.  In the Homeric poems one is conscious of a clinging reminiscence of lyric poetry and of a beginning of dramatic poetry.  Ode and drama meet in the epic.  There is a touch of all in each; but in each there exists a generative element to which all the other elements give place, and which imposes its own character upon the whole.

The drama is complete poetry.  The ode and the epic contain it only in germ; it contains both of them in a state of high development, and epitomizes both.  Surely, he who said:  “The French have not the epic brain,” said a true and clever thing; if he had said, “The moderns,” the clever remark would have been profound.  It is beyond question, however, that there is epic genius in that marvellous Athalie, so exalted and so simple in its sublimity that the royal century was unable to comprehend it.  It is certain, too, that the series of Shakespeare’s chronicle dramas presents a grand epic aspect.  But it is lyric poetry above all that befits the drama; it never embarrasses it, adapts itself to all its caprices, disports itself in all forms, sometimes sublime as in Ariel, sometimes grotesque as in Caliban.  Our era being above all else dramatic, is for that very reason eminently lyric.  There is more than one connection between the beginning and the end; the sunset has some features of the sunrise; the old man becomes a child once more.  But this second childhood is not like the first; it is as melancholy as the other is joyous.  It is the same with lyric poetry.  Dazzling, dreamy, at the dawn of civilization it reappears, solemn and pensive, at its decline.  The Bible opens joyously with Genesis and comes to a close with the threatening Apocalypse.  The modern ode is still inspired, but is no longer ignorant.  It meditates more than it scrutinizes; its musing is melancholy.  We see, by its painful labour, that the muse has taken the drama for her mate.

To make clear by a metaphor the ideas that we have ventured to put forth, we will compare early lyric poetry to a placid lake which reflects the clouds and stars; the epic is the stream which flows from the lake, and rushes on, reflecting its banks, forests, fields and cities, until it throws itself into the ocean of the drama.  Like the lake, the drama reflects the sky; like the stream, it reflects its banks; but it alone has tempests and measureless depths.