And yet, in the midst of our impatience, we
cannot help thinking also of how much healthy mental activity this one
man has been the occasion, how much good he has indirectly done to
society by withdrawing men to investigations and habits of thought that
secluded them from baser attractions, for how many he has enlarged the
circle of study and reflection; since there is nothing in history or
politics, nothing in art or science, nothing in physics or metaphysics,
that is not sooner or later taxed for his illustration. This is partially
true of all great minds, open and sensitive to truth and beauty through
any large arc of their circumference; but it is true in an unexampled
sense of Shakespeare, the vast round of whose balanced nature seems to
have been equatorial, and to have had a southward exposure and a summer
sympathy at every point, so that life, society, statecraft, serve us at
last but as commentaries on him, and whatever we have gathered of
thought, of knowledge, and of experience, confronted with his marvellous
page, shrinks to a mere foot-note, the stepping-stone to some hitherto
inaccessible verse. We admire in Homer the blind placid mirror of the
world's young manhood, the bard who escapes from his misfortune in poems
all memory, all life and bustle, adventure and picture; we revere in
Dante that compressed force of lifelong passion which could make a
private experience cosmopolitan in its reach and everlasting in its
significance; we respect in Goethe the Aristotelian poet, wise by
weariless observation, witty with intention, the stately _Geheimerrath_
of a provincial court in the empire of Nature.
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