e
body, will reproduce itself: the mind, too, is procreative,
transmitting itself to a remote posterity.

The best books are the highest products of human effort. Themselves
the evidence of creative power, they kindle and nourish power.
Consider what a spring of life to European people have been the books
of the Hebrews. What so precious treasure has England as Shakespeare?

To be good, books must be generic. They may be, in subject, in tone,
and in color, national; but in substance they must be so universally
human, that other cognate nations can imbibe and be nourished by them.
Not that, in their fashioning, this fitness for foreign minds is to be
a conscious aim; but to be thus attractive and assimilative, is a
proof of their breadth and depth--of their high humanity.

The peoples who earliest reached the state of culture which is
needed to bring forth books, each standing by itself, each necessarily
sang and wrote merely of itself. Thus did the Hebrews and the Greeks.
But already the Romans went out of themselves, and Virgil takes a
Trojan for his hero. This appropriation of foreign material shows that
the aim of high books is, to ascend to the sphere of ideas and
feelings that are independent of time and place. Thence, when, by
multiplication of Christian nations our mental world had become vastly
enlarged, embracing in one bond of culture, not only all modern
civilized peoples, but also the three great ancient ones, the
poets--especially the dramatic, for reasons that will be presently
stated--looked abroad and afar for the frame-work and corporeal stuff
of their writings.

The most universal of all writers, ancient or modern, he who is most
generic in his thought, Shakespeare, embodied his transcendent
conceptions for the most part in foreign personages. Of Shakespeare's
fourteen comedies, the scene of only one is laid in England; and that
one, "The Merry Wives of Windsor"--the only one not written chiefly or
largely in verse--is a Shakespearean farce. Of the tragedies
(except the series of the ten historical ones) only two, "Lear" and
"Macbeth," stand on British ground. Is "Hamlet" on that score less
English than "Lear," or "Othello" than "Macbeth"? Does Italy count
Juliet among her trophies, or Desdemona?

Of Milton's two dramas---to confine myself here to the dramatic
domain--the tragedy ("Samson Agonistes,") like his epics, is Biblical;
the comedy ("Comus") has its home in a sphere

"Above the smoke