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The excerpt represents the core issue or deciding factor on which you must meditate, and is drawn from Cratylus by Plato: themselves, and in time the relation of the two was reversed: the poems
which had once been a necessity of the human mind became a luxury: they
were now superseded by prose, which in all succeeding ages became the
natural vehicle of expression to all mankind. Henceforward prose and
poetry formed each other. A comparatively slender link between them was
also furnished by proverbs. We may trace in poetry how the simple
succession of lines, not without monotony, has passed into a complicated
period, and how in prose, rhythm and accent and the order of words and the
balance of clauses, sometimes not without a slight admixture of rhyme, make
up a new kind of harmony, swelling into strains not less majestic than
those of Homer, Virgil, or Dante.
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