sm; Shakespeare, of Feudalism; Milton, of
Protestantism; Goethe, of that new faith which is as yet without any
universally recognised label, but whose heaven is an ever-closer harmony
between the consciousness of man and all the natural forces of the
universe; whose liturgy is culture, and whose deity is a certain high
composure of the human heart.

The far-shining pre-eminence of Shakespeare, apart from the incomparable
fertility and depth of his natural gifts, arises secondarily from the
larger extent to which he transcended the special forming influences,
and refreshed his fancy and widened his range of sympathy, by recourse
to what was then the nearest possible approach to a historic or
political method. To the poet, vision reveals a certain form of the
truth, which the rest of men laboriously discover and prove by the
tardier methods of meditation and science. Shakespeare did not walk in
imagination with the great warriors, monarchs, churchmen, and rulers of
history, nor conceive their conduct, ideas, schemes, and throw himself
into their words and actions, without strengthening that original taste
which must have first drawn him to historical subjects, and without
deepening both his feeling for the great progression of human affairs,
and his sympathy for those relative moods of surveying and dealing with
them, which are not more positive, scientific, and political, than they
may be made truly poetic.

Again, while in Dante the inspiring force was spiritual, and in Goethe
it was intellectual, we may say that both in Shakespeare and Milton it
was political and social. In other words, with these two, the drama of
the one and the epic of the other were each of them connected with ideas
of government and the other external movements of men in society, and
with the play of the sentiments which spring from them. We assuredly do
not mean that in either of them, least of all in Shakespeare, there is
an absence of the spiritual element. This would be at once to thrust
them down into a lower place; for the spiritual is of the very essence
of poetry. But with the spiritual there mixes in our Englishmen a most
abundant leaven of recognition of the impressions and impulses of the
outer forms of life, as well as of active sympathy with the every-day
debate of the world. They are neither of them inferior to the highest in
sense of the wide and unutterable things of the spirit; yet with both of
them, more than with other poets of