Excerpt from The Sewanee Review, 1898, Vol. 6: A Quarterly Journal

We can not doubt that elegiac poetry in its strictest sense - to wit, the poetry that expresses longing and grief - has existed from the very earliest times among all people who have been capable of even the rudest sort of intellectual and artistic development. We know that poetry had a religious origin, and that death has always appealed to the religious emotions; the sorrow and longing caused by death would therefore find their natural outlet in verse of an elegiac char acter. We may infer, too, in accordance with a familiar method of anthropological reasoning, that the death-songs and wailing chants common to savage tribes to-day must have had their prototypes among the most primitive races of mankind. We are not left to mere inference, however, in the case of the only people who vitally concern us - the Greeks. We know that among the mythical predecessors of Homer a certain Linos was reckoned, and was connected a special dirge or funeral son name. We know also that Herodotus (il, 79) this song with the ao-called Maneros (mavfpm) of tians, and we shall soon have to deal with its prototype, the Adonis-song. We can thus see reasoning holds good of the most imports peoples.

The statement that the Greeks are the only ancient peo ple who vitally concern us needs a brief explanation. Greek literature is practically the only early literature that has af fected our own in point of form. Latin literature is Greek in form, save mainly for the satire in its more elaborate types, hence its influence upon ours has been rather to give color than to form. So, too, Hebrew literature, great as its effects have been upon our own, has rather colored it than molded it. But in tracing the development of any genre of literature we are naturally far more concerned with form than with color; hence we are justified in making all our studies begin with the literature of that great people whose sense for form has never yet been surpassed.

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