re is that happy land of faery
Which I so much do vaunt, but no where show,
But vouch antiquities, which nobody can know.

But let that man with better sense avise,
That of the world least part to us is read:
And daily how through hardy enterprize
Many great regions are discovered,
Which to late age were never mentioned.
Who ever heard of th' Indian Peru?
Or who in venturous vessel measured
The Amazons' huge river, now found true?
Or fruitfullest Virginia who did ever view?

Yet all these were when no man did them know,
Yet have from wisest ages hidden been:
And later times things more unknown shall show.
Why then should witless man so much misween
That nothing is but that which he hath seen?
What if within the moon's fair shining sphere,
What if in every other star unseen,
Of other worlds he happily should hear,
He wonder would much more; yet such to some appear."

Fancy's air-drawn pictures after history's waking dream shewed like clouds
over mountains; and from the romance of real life to the idlest fiction,
the transition seemed easy.--Shakspeare, as well as others of his time,
availed himself of the old Chronicles, and of the traditions or fabulous
inventions contained in them in such ample measure, and which had not yet
been appropriated to the purposes of poetry or the drama. The stage was a
new thing; and those who had to supply its demands laid their hands upon
whatever came within their reach: they were not particular as to the
means, so that they gained the end. Lear is founded upon an old ballad;
Othello on an Italian novel; Hamlet on a Danish, and Macbeth on a Scotch
tradition: one of which is to be found in Saxo-Grammaticus, and the last
in Hollingshed. The Ghost-scenes and the Witches in each, are
authenticated in the old Gothic history. There was also this connecting
link between the poetry of this age and the supernatural traditions of a
former one, that the belief in them was still extant, and in full force
and visible operation among the vulgar (to say no more) in the time of our
authors. The appalling and wild chimeras of superstition and ignorance,
"those bodiless creations that ecstacy is very cunning in," were inwoven
with existing manners and opinions, and all their effects on the passions
of terror or pity might be gathered from common and actual
observation--might be discerned in the workings of the face, the
expressions of the tongue, the wri