The Silent Isle by A.C. Benson

I listened the other day, at a public function, to an eloquent panegyric, pronounced by a man of great ability and sympathetic cultivation, on the Greek spirit. I fell for the moment entirely under the spell of his lofty rhetoric, his persuasive and illuminating argument. I wish I could reproduce what he said; but it was like a strain of beautiful music, and my mind was so much delighted by his rich eloquence, his subtle transitions, his deft modulations, that I had neither time nor opportunity to commit what he said to memory. One thing he said which struck me very much, that the Greek spirit resembled rather the modern scientific spirit than any other of the latter-day developments of thought. I think that this is true in a sense, that the Greeks were penetrated by an insatiable curiosity, and desired to study the principles and arrive at the truth of things.

But I do not, upon reflection, think that it is wholly true, because the modern spirit is greatly in love with classification and with detail, while the Greek spirit rather aimed at beauty, and investigated the causes of things with wonder and delight, in what may be called the romantic, the poetical spirit.