to satisfy it with deep
draughts of Wordsworth's celestial and pure simplicity? How again,
they tired of that too gentle and unworldly strain, and sought in
Shakespeare something more exciting, more genial, more rich in the
facts and passions of daily life? How even his all-embracing genius
failed to satisfy them, because he did not palpably connect for them
their fancy and their passions with their religious faith--and so
they wandered out again over the sea of literature, heaven only knows
whither, in search of a school of authors yet, alas! unborn. For the
true literature of the nineteenth century, the literature which shall
set forth in worthy strains the relation of the two greatest facts,
namely, of the universe and of Christ, which shall transfigure all
our enlarged knowledge of science and of society, of nature, of art,
and man, with the eternal truths of the gospel, that poetry of the
future is not yet here: but it is coming, ay even at the doors, when
this great era shall become conscious of its high vocation, and the
author too shall claim his priestly calling, and the poets of the
world, like the kingdoms of the world, shall become the poets of God
and of His Christ.

But to return. Should we not rather in education follow that method
which Providence has already mapped out for us? If we are bound, as
of course we are, to teach our pupils to breathe freely on the
highest mountain-peaks of Shakespeare's art, how can we more
certainly train them to do so, than by leading them along the same
upward path by which Shakespeare himself rose--through the various
changes of taste, the gradual developments of literature, through
which the English mind had been passing before Shakespeare's time?
For there was a literature before Shakespeare. Had there not been,
neither would there have been a Shakespeare. Critics are now
beginning to see that the old fancy which made Shakespeare spring up
at once, a self-perfected poet, like Minerva full-armed from the head
of Jove, was a superstition of pedants, who neither knew the ages
before the great poet, nor the man himself, except that little of him
which seemed to square with their shallow mechanical taste. The old
fairy superstition, the old legends and ballads, the old chronicles
of feudal war and chivalry, the earlier moralities and mysteries, and
tragi-comic attempts--these were the roots of his poetic tree--they
must be the roots of any literary education which