I have not mentioned Shakespeare, because his works come under a
different category. Though they mark the very highest level of human
genius, they yet represent no special epoch in the history of the
individual mind. The man of Shakespeare is always the man of actual life
as he is acted upon by the worlds of sense and of spirit under certain
definite conditions. We all of us _may_ be in the position of Macbeth or
Othello or Hamlet, and we appreciate their sayings and deeds
potentially, so to speak, rather than actually, through the sympathy of
our common nature and not of our experience. But with the four books I
have mentioned our relation is a very different one. We all of us grow
up through the Homeric period of the senses; we all feel, at some time,
sooner or later, the need of something higher, and, like Dante, shape
our theory of the divine government of the universe; we all with
Cervantes discover the rude contrast between the ideal and real, and
with Goethe the unattainableness of the highest good through the
intellect alone. Therefore I set these books by themselves. I do not
mean that we read them, or for their full enjoyment need to read them,
in this light; but I believe that this fact of their universal and
perennial application to our consciousness and our experience accounts
for their permanence, and insures their immortality.
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