generation, in
knowledge, belief, and manners,--human nature remains unalterable in its
elements, unchanged from age to age; and it is human nature, under its
various guises, with which the great poets deal.

The Iliad and the Odyssey do not become antiquated to us. The characters
of Shakespeare are perpetually modern. Homer, Dante, Shakespeare, stand
alone in the closeness of their relation to nature. Each after his own
manner gives us a view of life, as seen by the poetic imagination, such
as no other poet has given to us. Homer, first of all poets, shows us
individual personages sharply defined, but in the early stages of
intellectual and moral development, the first representatives of the
race at its conscious entrance upon the path of progress, with simple
motives, simple theories of existence, simple and limited experience. He
is plain and direct in the presentation of life, and in the substance
no less than in the expression of his thought.

In Shakespeare's work the individual man is no less sharply defined, no
less true to nature, but the long procession of his personages is wholly
different in effect from that of the Iliad and the Odyssey. They have
lost the simplicity of the older race; they are the products of a longer
and more varied experience; they have become more complex. And
Shakespeare is plain and direct neither in the substance of his thought
nor in the expression of it. The world has grown older, and in the
evolution of his nature man has become conscious of the irreconcilable
paradoxes of life, and more or less aware that while he is infinite in
faculty, he is also the quintessence of dust. But there is one essential
characteristic in which Shakespeare and Homer resemble each other as
poets,--that they both show to us the scene of life without the
interference of their own personality. Each simply holds the mirror up
to nature, and lets us see the reflection, without making comment on the
show. If there be a lesson in it we must learn it for ourselves.

Dante comes between the two, and differs more widely from each of them
than they from one another. They are primarily poets. He is primarily a
moralist who is also a poet. Of Homer the man, and of Shakespeare the
man, we know, and need to know, nothing; it is only with them as poets
that we are concerned. But it is needful to know Dante as man, in order
fully to appreciate him as poet. He gives us his world not as reflection
from an unconscious a