, hast all the all of me.

What a new way of talking about love! Not a happier way--there is less of
heart's-ease in these doubts, delicacies, subtleties--but how much more
thoughtful! How has our Nut-Brown Maid eaten of the tree of knowledge!

Well, there happened a Shakespeare, to do this for English Verse: and
Shakespeare was a miracle which I cheerfully leave others to rationalise
for you, having, for my own part and so far as I have fared in life,
found more profit in a capacity for simple wonder.

But I can tell you how the path was made straight to that miracle. The
shock of the New Learning upon Europe awoke men and unsealed men's
eyes--unsealed the eyes of Englishmen in particular--to discover a
literature, and the finest in the world, which _habitually philosophised
life_: a literature which, whether in a chorus of Sophocles or a talk
reported by Plato, or in a ribald page of Aristophanes or in a knotty
chapter of Thucydides, was in one guise or another for ever asking _Why?_
'What is man doing here, and why is he doing it?' 'What is his purpose?
his destiny?' 'How stands he towards those unseen powers--call them the
gods, or whatever you will--that guide and thwart, provoke, madden,
control him so mysteriously?' 'What are these things we call good and
evil, life, love, death?'

These are questions which, once raised, haunt Man until he finds an
answer--some sort of answer to satisfy him. Englishmen, hitherto content
with the Church's answers but now aware of this great literature which
answered so differently--and having other reasons to suspect what the
Church said and did--grew aware that their literature had been as a child
at play. It had never philosophised good and evil, life, love or death:
it had no literary forms for doing this; it had not even the vocabulary.
So our ancestors saw that to catch up their lee-way--to make their report
worthy of this wonderful, alluring discovery--new literary forms had to
be invented--new, that is, in English: the sonnet, the drama, the verse
in which the actors were to declaim, the essay, the invented tale. Then,
for the vocabulary, obviously our fathers had either to go to Greek,
which had invented the A.B.C. of philosophising; or to seek in the other
languages which were already ahead of English in adapting that alphabet;
or to give our English Words new contents, new connotations, new
meanings; or lastly, to do all three together.

Well, it was done; and in ver