The balance of private good and general welfare is at the bottom of civilized morals but the morals of the Heroic Age are founded on individuality, and on nothing else.

If epic poetry is a definite species, the sagas do not fall within it.

But the gravest difficulty, and perhaps the most important, in poetry meant solely for recitation, is the difficulty of achieving verbal beauty, or rather of making verbal beauty tell.

The Border Ballads, for instance, and the Robin Hood Ballads, clearly suppose a state of society which is nothing but a very circumscribed and not very important heroic age.

With several different kinds of poetry to choose from, a man would decide that he would like best to be an epic poet, and he would set out, in conscious determination, on an epic poem.

That is to say, epic poetry has been invented many times and independently; but, as the needs which prompted the invention have been broadly similar, so the invention itself has been.

The first epics were intended for recitation; the literary epic is meant to be read.