Read it through once

We need it in order to judge our individual poets, though we refuse to judge our literature as a whole in comparison with one which has produced a classic. Whether a literature does culminate in a classic, is a matter of fortune. It is largely, I suspect, a question of the degree of fusion of the elements within that language; so that the Latin languages can approximate more closely to the classic, not simply because they are Latin, but because they are more homogeneous than English, and therefore tend more naturally towards the common style: whereas English, being the most various of great languages in its constituents, tends to variety rather than perfection, needs the longest time to realise its potency, and still contains, perhaps, more unexplored possibilities. It has, perhaps, the greatest capacity for changing, and yet remaining itself.