what grist they wanted, coarse or fine, and it seems a mere
piece of luck that the smooth stream of his activity reflected with such
ravishing clearness every changing mood of heaven and earth, every stick
and stone, every dog and clown and courtier that stood upon its brink.
It is a curious illustration of the friendly manner in which Shakespeare
received everything that came along,--of what a _present_ man he
was,--that in the very same year that the mulberry-tree was brought into
England, he got one and planted it in his garden at Stratford.

It is perfectly true that this is a materialistic age, and for that very
reason we want our poets all the more. We find that every generation
contrives to catch its singing larks without the sky's falling. When the
poet comes, he always turns out to be the man who discovers that the
passing moment is the inspired one, and that the secret of poetry is not
to have lived in Homer's day, or Dante's, but to be alive now. To be
alive now, that is the great art and mystery. They are dead men who live
in the past, and men yet unborn that live in the future. We are like
Hans in Luck, forever exchanging the burdensome good we have for
something else, till at last we come home empty-handed.

That pale-faced drudge of Time opposite me there, that weariless sexton
whose callous hands bury our rosy hours in the irrevocable past, is even
now reaching forward to a moment as rich in life, in character, and
thought, as full of opportunity, as any since Adam. This little isthmus
that we are now standing on is the point to which martyrs in their
triumphant pain, prophets in their fervor, and poets in their ecstasy,
looked forward as the golden future, as the land too good for them to
behold with mortal eyes; it is the point toward which the faint-hearted
and desponding hereafter will look back as the priceless past when there
was still some good and virtue and opportunity left in the world.

The people who feel their own age prosaic are those who see only its
costume. And that is what makes it prosaic--that we have not faith
enough in ourselves to think our own clothes good enough to be presented
to posterity in. The artists fancy that the court dress of posterity is
that of Van Dyck's time, or Caesar's. I have seen the model of a statue
of Sir Robert Peel,--a statesman whose merit consisted in yielding
gracefully to the present,--in which the sculptor had done his best to
travesty the real man i