rivers,
and the seas. In his presence all the cataracts fall and foam, the
mists rise, and the clouds form and float. To really know one fact is
known its kindred and its neighbors. Shakespeare, looking at a coat of
mail, instantly imagined the society, the conditions that produced it,
and what it, in its turn, produced. He saw the castle, the moat, the
drawbridge, the lady in the tower, and the knightly lover spurring over
the plain. He saw the bold baron and the rude retainer, the trampled
serfs, and all the glory and the grief of feudal life. The man of
imagination has lived the life of all people, of all races. He has
been a citizen of Athens in the days of Pericles; listened to the eager
eloquence of the great orator, and has sat upon the cliff, and with the
tragic poet heard "the multitudinous laughter of the sea." He has seen
Socrates thrust the spear of question through the shield and heart of
falsehood--was present when the great man drank hemlock and met the
night of death tranquil as a star meets morning. He has followed the
peripatetic philosophers, and has been puzzled by the sophists. He has
watched Phidias, as he chiseled shapeless stone to forms of love and
awe. He has lived by the slow Nile, amid the vast and monstrous. He
knows the very thought that wrought the form and features of the
Sphinx. He has heard great Memnon's morning song, has laid him down
with the embalmed dead, and felt within their dust the expectation of
another life, mingled with cold and suffocating doubts--the children
born of long delay. He has walked the ways of mighty Rome, has seen
the great Caesar with his legions in the field, has stood with vast and
motley throngs and watched the triumphs given to victorious men,
followed by uncrowned kings, the captured hosts and all the spoils of
ruthless war. He has heard the shout that shook the Coliseum's roofless
walls when from the reeling gladiator's hand the short sword fell,
while from his bosom gushed the stream of wasted life. He has lived
the life of savage men--has trod the forest's silent depths, and in the
desperate name of life or death has matched his thought against the
instinct of the beast. He has sat beneath the bo tree's contemplative
shade, rapt in Buddha's mighty thought, and he has dreamed all dreams
that light, the alchemist, hath wrought from dust and dew and stored
within the slumbrous poppy's subtle blood. He has knelt with awe and
dread at every p