I heard a song of love, and tenderness, and sadness, and beauty, sweeter
than the song of a nightingale. It was breathed from the soul of Robert
Burns. I heard a song of deepest passion surging like the tempest-tossed
waves of the sea. It was the restless spirit of Lord Byron.
I heard a mournful melody of despairing love, full of that wild, mad,
hopeless longing of a bereaved soul which the mid-night raven mocked at
with that bitterest of all words--"Nevermore!" It was the weird threnody
of the brilliant, but ill-starred Poe, who, like a meteor, blazed but
for a moment, dazzling a hemisphere, and then went out forever in the
darkness of death.
Then I was exalted, and lifted into the serene sunlight of peace, as
I listened to the spirit of faith, pouring out in the songs of our own
immortal Longfellow.
With Milton I walked the scented isles of long lost Paradise, and caught
the odor of its bloom, and the swell of its music. He led me through
its rose brakes, and under the vermilion and flame of its orchids and
honeysuckles, down to the margin of the limpid river, where the water
lilies slept in fadeless beauty, and the lotus nodded to the rippling
waves; and there, under a bridal arch of orange blossoms, cordoned by
palms and many-colored flowers, I saw a vision of bliss and beauty from
which Satan turned away with an envy that stabbed him with pangs unfelt
before in hell! It was earth's first vision of wedded love.
But the horizon of Shakespeare was broader than them all. There is no
depth which he has not sounded, no height which he has not measured.
He walked in the gardens of the intellectual gods and gathered sweets
for the soul from a thousand unwithering flowers. He caught music from
the spheres, and beauty from ten thousand fields of light. His brain was
a mighty loom. His genius gathered and classified, his imagination spun
and wove; the flying shuttle of his fancy delivered to the warp of
wisdom and philosophy the shining threads spun from the fibres of human
hearts and human experience; and with his wondrous woof of pictured
tapestries, he clothed all thought in the bridal robes of immortality.
His mind was a resistless flood that deluged the world of literature
with its glory. The succeeding poets are but survivors as by the ark,
and, like the ancient dove, they gather and weave into garlands only
the "flotsam" of beauty which floats on the bosom of the Shakespearean
flood.
Oh, Shakespeare, archangel of poetry! The light from thy wings drowns
the stars and flashes thy glory on the civilizations of the whole world!
"Unwearied, unfettered, unwatched, unconfined,
Be my spirit like thee, in the world of the mind;
No leaning for earth e'er to weary its flight;
But fresh as thy pinions in regions of light."
All honor to the poets and philosophers and painters and sculptors and
musicians of the world! They are its honeybees; its songbirds; its
carrier doves, its ministering angels.