GREEK SOURCES OF SHELLEY'S ADONAIS^'' 



By George Noblin 



"We are all Greeks," says Shelley, "our laws, our literature, 

 our religion, our arts, have their roots in Greece." ^^) 



The essential truth in this enthusiastic utterance of Shelley 

 will ever make a knowledge of Greek civilization an important part 

 of the equipment of the scholar. It is not the knowledge of Greek 

 civilization alone that is in question ; it is the knowledge and un- 

 derstanding of our own, which presupposes and implies the Greek, 

 one might almost say, as the day implies the sun.^^) 



It was a favorite dictum of Max Mliller that in order to under- 

 stand what men are we must know what they have been. When we 

 cease to understand the sources from which many of the highest 

 products of our life have come, we lose the key to knowledge of our- 

 selves. We cannot intelligently ignore the influences that have 

 entered, however unobtrusively and unconsciously, into the life of 

 the present and made us what we are. 



From this point of view it is evidently sheer stupidity to call 

 the study of Greek, the study of a language, a literature, a past, that 

 is dead. It is rather the study of a past that has never died, or if, 

 in a sense, it be said to have perished, it was only that it might 

 again have life and have it more abundantly. 



Particularly in some of the higher products of our civilization, 



(1) After this paper was in the hands of the printer, I learned that its results have been in 



part, at least, anticipated by Dr. Richard Akermann, Quellen Vorbilder Stoffe zu 

 Shelley's Poetischen Werken, Leipzig, 1890. 



(2) Preface to Hellas. 



(3) In this connection one might compare with the seemingrly extravagrant statement of 



Shelley the words of a thinker of very different type. Sir Henry Sumner Maine: 

 To one small people * * * * it was given to create the principle of Progress. 

 That people was the Greek. Except the blind forces of Nature, nothing moves in 

 this world which is not Greek in its origin. 



