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.