222 PROFESSIONAL INSTITUTIONS. 



by our own priests, and to the exalted utterance spontane 

 ously fallen into under religious excitement.* But in course 

 of time, this quasi-musical utterance of hexameters was 

 dropped by a certain derived secular class, the Rhapsodists. 

 These, who recited at courts &quot; the books [of Homer] sepa 

 rately, some one, some the other, at the feasts or public 

 solemnities of the Greek cities,&quot; and who themselves some 

 times composed &quot; dedicatory prologues or epilogues in hon 

 our of the deities with whose festivals such public perform 

 ances were connected/ and became in so far themselves 

 poets, were distinguished from the early poets by their non- 

 musical speech. 



&quot;While the latter sang, solely or chiefly, his own compositions to the 

 accompaniment of his lyre, the rhapsodist, bearing a laurel branch or 

 wand as his badge of office, rehearsed, without musical accompaniment, 

 the poems of others : &quot; [sometimes, as above said, joined with his own.] 

 Thus there simultaneously arose a class of secular poets and 

 a divergence of poetry from song. 



A parallel genesis occurred among the Romans. Though 

 its sequences w r ere broken, its beginning was the same. Says 

 Grimm 



&quot; Poetry borders so closely on divination, the Koman vates is alike 

 songster and soothsayer, and soothsaying was certainly a priestly 

 function.&quot; 

 Congruous with this is the statement that 



* In his learned work, The Modes of Ancient Greek Music, he writes : 

 &quot; Several indications combine to make it probable that singing and speak 

 ing were not so widely separated from each other in Greek as in the modern 

 languages with which we are most familiar.&quot; (p. 113) . . . singing and speak 

 ing were more closely akin than they ever are in our experience (p. 119). Curi 

 ous verification has just come to hand in an account of Omaha Indian music 

 by Miss Alice Fletcher, who long resided with the Omahas. She says : &quot; This 

 absence of a standard pitch, and the Indian s management of the voice which 

 is similar in singing and in speaking, make Indian music seem to be out of tune 

 to our ears.&quot; 



Thus it is clear that the primitive priest-poet of the Greeks was simply an 

 emotionally-excited orator, whose speech diverged from the common speech by 

 becoming more measured and more intoned. 



