All favorable stars seem to have been in conjunction at his nativity.
The Reformation had passed the period of its vinous fermentation, and its
clarified results remained as an element of intellectual impulse and
exhilaration; there were small signs yet of the acetous and putrefactive
stages which were to follow in the victory and decline of Puritanism. Old
forms of belief and worship still lingered, all the more touching to
Fancy, perhaps, that they were homeless and attainted; the light of
sceptic day was baffled by depths of forest where superstitious shapes
still cowered, creatures of immemorial wonder, the raw material of
Imagination. The invention of printing, without yet vulgarizing letters,
had made the thought and history of the entire past contemporaneous;
while a crowd of translators put every man who could read in inspiring
contact with the select souls of all the centuries. A new world was thus
opened to intellectual adventure at the very time when the keel of
Columbus had turned the first daring furrow of discovery in that
unmeasured ocean which still girt the known earth with a beckoning
horizon of hope and conjecture, which was still fed by rivers that flowed
down out of primeval silences, and which still washed the shores of
Dreamland.
Pages:
207
208
209
210
211
212
213
214
215
216
217
218
219
220
221
222
223
224
225
226
227
228
229
230
231