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.