Under a wise, cultivated, and firm-handed monarch also, the
national feeling of England grew rapidly more homogeneous and intense,
the rather as the womanhood of the sovereign stimulated a more chivalric
loyalty,--while the new religion, of which she was the defender, helped
to make England morally, as it was geographically, insular to the
continent of Europe.
If circumstances could ever make a great national poet, here were all the
elements mingled at melting-heat in the alembic, and the lucky moment of
projection was clearly come. If a great national poet could ever avail
himself of circumstances, this was the occasion,--and, fortunately,
Shakespeare was equal to it. Above all, we may esteem it lucky that he
found words ready to his use, original and untarnished,--types of thought
whose sharp edges were unworn by repeated impressions. In reading
Hakluyt's Voyages, we are almost startled now and then to find that even
common sailors could not tell the story of their wanderings without
rising to an almost Odyssean strain, and habitually used a diction that
we should be glad to buy back from desuetude at any cost. Those who look
upon language only as anatomists of its structure, or who regard it as
only a means of conveying abstract truth from mind to mind, as if it were
so many algebraic formulae, are apt to overlook the fact that its being
alive is all that gives it poetic value.
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