glish yeomen on the
eve of battle.

He laid the book aside.

"Of course you have noticed how Shakespeare likes this word
'mettle,' how he likes the _thing_. The word can be seen from afar
over the vast territory of his plays like the same battle-flag set
up in different parts of a field. It is conspicuous in the heroic
English plays, and in the Roman and in the Greek; it waves alike
over comedy and tragedy as a rallying signal to human nature. I
imagine I can see his face as he writes of the mettle of
children--the mettle of a boy--the quick mettle of a schoolboy--a
lad of mettle--the mettle of a gentleman--the mettle of the
sex--the mettle of a woman, Lady Macbeth--the mettle of a king--the
mettle of a speech--even the mettle of a rascal--mettle in death.
I love to think of him, a man who had known trouble, writing the
words: 'The insuppressive mettle of our spirits.'

"But this particular phrase--the mettle of the pasture--belongs
rather to our century than to his, more to Darwin than to the
theatre of that time. What most men are thinking of now, if they
think at all, is of our earth, a small grass-grown planet hung in
space. And, unaccountably making his appearance on it, is man, a
pasturing animal, deriving his mettle from his pasture. The old
question comes newly up to us: Is anything ever added to him? Is
anything ever lost to him? Evolution--is it anything more than
change? Civilizations--are they anything but different
arrangements of the elements of man's nature with reference to the
preeminence of some elements and the subsidence of others?

"Suppose you take the great passions: what new one has been added,
what old one has been lost? Take all the passions you find in
Greek literature, in the Roman. Have you not seen them reappear in
American life in your own generation? I believe I have met them in
my office. You may think I have not seen Paris and Helen, but I
have. And I have seen Orestes and Agamemnon and Clytemnestra and
Oedipus. Do you suppose I have not met Tarquin and Virginia and
Lucretia and Shylock--to come down to nearer times--and seen Lear
and studied Macbeth in the flesh? I knew Juliet once, and behind
locked doors I have talked with Romeo. They are all here in any
American commonwealth at the close of our century: the great
tragedies are numbered--the oldest are the newest. So that
sometimes I fix my eyes only on the old. I see merely the planet
with its middle green