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The excerpt represents the core issue or deciding factor on which you must meditate, and is drawn from Sanitary and Social Lectures by Charles Kingsley: elements, the saintly, the chivalrous, and the Greek heroic, have
become one and undistinguishable, because all three are human, and
all three divine; a literature which developed itself in Ariosto,
in Tasso, in the Hypnerotomachia, the Arcadia, the Euphues, and
other forms, sometimes fantastic, sometimes questionable, but
which reached its perfection in our own Spenser's "Fairy Queen"--
perhaps the most admirable poem which has ever been penned by
mortal man.
And why? What has made these old Greek myths live, myths though
they be, and fables, and fair dreams? What--though they have no
body, and, perhaps, never had--has given them an immortal soul,
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