("The yonge sonne
Had in _the Bull_ half of his course yronne.")
And just at this moment of blossoming every breeze was dusty with the
golden pollen of Greece, Rome, and Italy. If Keats could say, when he
first opened Chapman's Homer,--
"Then felt I like some watcher of the skies
When a new planet swims into his ken;
Or like stout Cortez when with eagle eyes
He stared at the Pacific, and all his men
Looked at each other with a wild surmise,"
if Keats could say this, whose mind had been unconsciously fed with the
results of this culture,--results that permeated all thought, all
literature, and all talk,--fancy what must have been the awakening shock
and impulse communicated to men's brains by the revelation of this new
world of thought and fancy, an unveiling gradual yet sudden, like that of
a great organ, which discovered to them what a wondrous instrument was in
the soul of man with its epic and lyric stops, its deep thunders of
tragedy, and its passionate _vox humana!_ It might almost seem as if
Shakespeare had typified all this in Miranda, when she cries out at first
sight of the king and his courtiers,
"O, wonder!
How many goodly creatures are there here!
How beauteous mankind is! O, brave new world
That hath such people in't!"
The civil wars of the Roses had been a barren period in English
literature, because they had been merely dynastic squabbles, in which no
great principles were involved which could shake all minds with
controversy and heat them to intense conviction.
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