as sent to take note of it, to give long-enduring record of
it. Two fit men: Dante, deep, fierce as the central fire of the world;
Shakespeare, wide, placid, far-seeing, as the Sun, the upper light of
the world. Italy produced the one world-voice; we English had the
honour of producing the other.

Curious enough how, as it were by mere accident, this man came to us.
I think always, so great, quiet, complete and self-sufficing is this
Shakespeare, had the Warwickshire Squire not prosecuted him for
deer-stealing, we had perhaps never heard of him as a Poet! The woods
and skies, the rustic Life of Man in Stratford there, had been enough
for this man! But indeed that strange outbudding of our whole English
Existence, which we call the Elizabethan Era, did not it too come as
of its own accord? The 'Tree Igdrasil' buds and withers by its own
laws,--too deep for our scanning. Yet it does bud and wither, and
every bough and leaf of it is there, by fixed eternal laws; not a Sir
Thomas Lucy but comes at the hour fit for him. Curious, I say, and not
sufficiently considered: how everything does co-operate with all; not
a leaf rotting on the highway but is indissoluble portion of solar and
stellar systems; no thought, word or act of man but has sprung withal
out of all men, and works sooner or later, recognizably or
irrecognizably, on all men! It is all a Tree: circulation of sap and
influences, mutual communication of every minutest leaf with the
lowest talon of a root, with every other greatest and minutest portion
of the whole. The Tree Igdrasil, that has its roots down in the
Kingdoms of Hela and Death, and whose boughs overspread the highest
Heaven!--

In some sense it may be said that this glorious Elizabethan Era with
its Shakespeare, as the outcome and flowerage of all which had
preceded it, is itself attributable to the Catholicism of the Middle
Ages. The Christian Faith, which was the theme of Dante's Song, had
produced this Practical Life which Shakespeare was to sing. For
Religion then, as it now and always is, was the soul of Practice; the
primary vital fact in men's life. And remark here, as rather curious,
that Middle-Age Catholicism was abolished, so far as Acts of
Parliament could abolish it, before Shakespeare, the noblest product
of it, made his appearance. He did make his appearance nevertheless.
Nature at her own time, with Catholicism or what else might be
necessary, sent him forth; taking small thought of Ac