There is nothing that demonstrates this more clearly, as there is
nothing, in my judgment, more touching and picturesque in all poetry,
than that passage in the eleventh book of the "Odyssey," where the shade
of Achilles tells Ulysses that he would rather be the poorest
shepherd-boy on a Grecian hill than king over the unsubstantial shades
of Hades. Dante's poem, on the other hand, sets forth the passage of man
from the world of sense to that of spirit; in other words, his moral
conversion. It is Dante relating his experience in the great
camp-meeting of mankind, but relating it, by virtue of his genius, so
representatively that it is no longer the story of one man, but of all
men. Then comes Cervantes, showing the perpetual and comic contradiction
between the spiritual and the natural man in actual life, marking the
transition from the age of the imagination to that of the intellect;
and, lastly, Goethe, the poet of a period in which a purely intellectual
culture reached its maximum of development, depicts its one-sidedness,
and its consequent failure. These books, then, are not national, but
human, and record certain phases of man's nature, certain stages of his
moral progress. They are gospels in the lay bible of the race. It will
remain for the future poet to write the epic of the complete man, as it
remains for the future world to afford the example of his entire and
harmonious development.
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