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.
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.