le themselves: he is the possession of all the chosen of
the world for uncounted time. Dante, one calculates, may long survive
Mahomet. In this way the balance may be made straight again.

But, at any rate, it is not by what is called their effect on the world,
by what _we_ can judge of their effect there, that a man and his work
are measured. Effect? Influence? Utility? Let a man _do_ his work; the
fruit of it is the care of Another than he. It will grow its own fruit;
and whether embodied in Caliph Thrones and Arabian Conquests, so that it
"fills all Morning and Evening Newspapers," and all Histories, which are
a kind of distilled Newspapers; or not embodied so at all;--what matters
that? That is not the real fruit of it! The Arabian Caliph, in so far
only as he did something, was something. If the great Cause of Man, and
Man's work in God's Earth, got no furtherance from the Arabian Caliph,
then no matter how many scimetars he drew, how many gold piasters
pocketed, and what uproar and blaring he made in this world,--_he_ was
but a loud-sounding inanity and futility; at bottom, he _was_ not
at all. Let us honor the great empire of _Silence_, once more! The
boundless treasury which we do not jingle in our pockets, or count up
and present before men! It is perhaps, of all things, the usefulest for
each of us to do, in these loud times.--

As Dante, the Italian man, was sent into our world to embody musically
the Religion of the Middle Ages, the Religion of our Modern Europe, its
Inner Life; so Shakspeare, we may say, embodies for us the Outer Life
of our Europe as developed then, its chivalries, courtesies, humors,
ambitions, what practical way of thinking, acting, looking at the
world, men then had. As in Homer we may still construe Old Greece; so in
Shakspeare and Dante, after thousands of years, what our modern Europe
was, in Faith and in Practice, will still be legible. Dante has given us
the Faith or soul; Shakspeare, in a not less noble way, has given us the
Practice or body. This latter also we were to have; a man was sent for
it, the man Shakspeare. Just when that chivalry way of life had reached
its last finish, and was on the point of breaking down into slow or
swift dissolution, as we now see it everywhere, this other sovereign
Poet, with his seeing eye, with his perennial singing voice, was sent to
take note of it, to give long-enduring record of it. Two fit men: Dante,
deep, fierce as the central fire of