The nations have retained nothing of the wandering life of the earlier time, save respect for the stranger and the traveller.

The family has a fatherland; everything is connected therewith; it has the cult of the house and the cult of the tomb.
We say again, such a civilization can find its one expression only in the epic.

The epic will assume diverse forms, but will never lose its specific character.

Pindar is more priestlike than patriarchal, more epic than lyrical.

If the chroniclers, the necessary accompaniments of this second age of the world, set about collecting traditions and begin to reckon by centuries, they labour to no purpose--chronology cannot expel poesy; history remains an epic.