After dinner everybody went to sleep, even the children.

category belong Herodotus, Thucydides, and other historians of the same order, whose

descriptions are for the most part limited to deeds, events, and states of society, which they had

before their eyes, and whose spirit they shared. They simply transferred what was passing in the

world around them, to the realm of representative intellect. An external phenomenon is thus

translated into an internal conception. In the same way the poet operates upon the material

supplied him by his emotions, projecting it into an image for the conceptive faculty. These original

historians did, it is true, find statements and narratives of other men ready to hand. One person

cannot be an eye and ear witness of everything. But they make use of such aids only as the poet