" Before him, as before Adam, the
creation passes to be named anew: first the material world; then the
world of passions and emotions; then the world of ideas. But whenever a
great imagination comes, however it may delight itself with imaging the
outward beauty of things, however it may seem to flow thoughtlessly away
in music like a brook, yet the shadow of heaven lies also in its depth
beneath the shadow of earth. Continually the visible universe suggests
the invisible. We are forever feeling this in Shakespeare. His
imagination went down to the very bases of things, and while his
characters are the most natural that poet ever created, they are also
perfectly ideal, and are more truly the personifications of abstract
thoughts and passions than those of any allegorical writer whatever.
Even in what seems so purely a picturesque poem as the "Iliad," we feel
something of this. Beholding as Homer did, from the tower of
contemplation, the eternal mutability and nothing permanent but change,
he must look underneath the show for the reality. Great captains and
conquerors came forth out of the eternal silence, entered it again with
their trampling hosts, and shoutings, and trumpet-blasts, and were as
utterly gone as those echoes of their deeds which he sang, and which
faded with the last sound of his voice and the last tremble of his lyre.
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