XXIII REMARKS AT THE CELEBRATION OF THE THREE HUNDREDTH REVERE HOUSE. BOSTON, 1864 ENGLAND's genius filled all measure Of heart and soul, of strength and pleasure Gave to mind its emperor And life was larger than before; And centuries brood,. nor can attain The sense and bound of Shakspeare's brain. T I SHAKSPEARE IS not our fault if we have not made this evening's circle still richer than it is. We seriously endeavored, besides our brothers and our seniors, on whom the ordinary lead of literary and social action falls - and falls because of their ability - to draw out of their retirements a few rarer lovers of the muse"seld-seen flamens "-whom this day seemed to elect and challenge. And it is to us a painful disappointment that Bryant and Whittier as guests, and our own Hawthorne, with the best will to come, should have found it impossible at last; and again, that a well-known and honored compatriot, who first in Boston wrote elegant verse, and on Shakspeare, and whose American devotion through forty or fifty years to the affairs of a bank, has not been able to bury the fires of his genius, Mr. Charles Sprague, pleads the infirmities of age as an absolute bar to his presence with us. We regret also the absence of our members Sumner and Motley. We can hardly think of an occasion where so little need be said. We are all content to let Shakspeare speak for himself. His fame is settled on the foundations of the moral and intellectual world. Wherever there are men, and in the degree in which they are civilhave power of mind, sensibility to beauty, music, the secrets of passion, and the liquid expression of thought, he has risen to his place as the first poet of the world. Genius is the consoler of our mortal condition, and Shakspeare taught us that the little world of the heart is vaster, deeper and richer than the spaces of astronomy. What shocks of surprise and sympathetic power, this battery, which he is, imparts to every fine mind that is born! We say to the young child in the cradle, Happy, and defended against Fate! for here is Nature, and here is Shakspeare, waiting for you !' 'Tis our metre of culture. He is a cultivated man who can tell us something new of Shakspeare. All criticism is only a making of rules out of his beauties. He is as superior to his countrymen, as to all other countrymen. He fulfilled the famous prophecy of Socrates, that the poet most excellent in tragedy would be most excellent in comedy, and more than fulfilled it by making tragedy also a victorious melody which healed its own wounds. In short, Shakspeare is the one resource of our life on which no gloom gathers; the fountain of joy which honors him who tastes it; day without night; pleasure without repentance; the genius which, in unpoetic ages, keeps poetry in honor and, in sterile periods, keeps up the credit of the human mind. His genius has reacted on himself. Men were so astonished and occupied by his poems that they have not been able to see his face and condition, or say, who was his father and his brethren; or what life he led; and at the short distance of three hundred years he is mythical, like Orpheus and Homer, and we have already seen the most fantastic theories plausibly urged, as that Raleigh and Bacon were the authors of the plays. Yet we pause expectant before the genius of Shakspeare -as if his biography were not yet written; until the problem of the whole English race is solved. I see, among the lovers of this catholic genius, here present, a few, whose deeper knowledge invites me to hazard an article of my literary creed; that Shakspeare, by his transcendant |