that? That is not the real fruit of it! The Arabian Caliph, in so far
only as he did something, was something. If the great Cause of Man, and
Man's work in God's Earth, got no furtherance from the Arabian Caliph, then
no matter how many scimetars he drew, how many gold piasters pocketed, and
what uproar and blaring he made in this world,--_he_ was but a
loud-sounding inanity and futility; at bottom, he _was_ not at all. Let us
honor the great empire of _Silence_, once more! The boundless treasury
which we do not jingle in our pockets, or count up and present before men!
It is perhaps, of all things, the usefulest for each of us to do, in these
loud times.--


As Dante, the Italian man, was sent into our world to embody musically the
Religion of the Middle Ages, the Religion of our Modern Europe, its Inner
Life; so Shakspeare, we may say, embodies for us the Outer Life of our
Europe as developed then, its chivalries, courtesies, humors, ambitions,
what practical way of thinking, acting, looking at the world, men then had.
As in Homer we may still construe Old Greece; so in Shakspeare and Dante,
after thousands of years, what our modern Europe was, in Faith and in
Practice, will still be legible. Dante has given us the Faith or soul;
Shakspeare, in a not less noble way, has given us the Practice or body.
This latter also we were to have; a man was sent for it, the man
Shakspeare. Just when that chivalry way of life had reached its last
finish, and was on the point of breaking down into slow or swift
dissolution, as we now see it everywhere, this other sovereign Poet, with
his seeing eye, with his perennial singing voice, was sent to take note of
it, to give long-enduring record of it. Two fit men: Dante, deep, fierce
as the central fire of the world; Shakspeare, wide, placid, far-seeing, as
the Sun, the upper light of the world. Italy produced the one world-voice;
we English had the honor of producing the other.