Curious enough how, as it were by mere accident, this man came to us. I
think always, so great, quiet, complete and self-sufficing is this
Shakspeare, had the Warwickshire Squire not prosecuted him for
deer-stealing, we had perhaps never heard of him as a Poet! The woods and
skies, the rustic Life of Man in Stratford there, had been enough for this
man! But indeed that strange outbudding of our whole English Existence,
which we call the Elizabethan Era, did not it too come as of its own
accord? The "Tree Igdrasil" buds and withers by its own laws,--too deep
for our scanning. Yet it does bud and wither, and every bough and leaf of
it is there, by fixed eternal laws; not a Sir Thomas Lucy but comes at the
hour fit for him. Curious, I say, and not sufficiently considered: how
everything does co-operate with all; not a leaf rotting on the highway but
is indissoluble portion of solar and stellar systems; no thought, word or
act of man but has sprung withal out of all men, and works sooner or later,
recognizably or irrecognizable, on all men! It is all a Tree: circulation
of sap and influences, mutual communication of every minutest leaf with the
lowest talon of a root, with every other greatest and minutest portion of
the whole. The Tree Igdrasil, that has its roots down in the Kingdoms of
Hela and Death, and whose boughs overspread the highest Heaven!--

In some sense it may be said that this glorious Elizabethan Era with its
Shakspeare, as the outcome and flowerage of all which had preceded it, is
itself attributable to the Catholicism of the Middle Ages. The Christian
Faith, which was the theme of Dante's Song, had produced this Practical
Life which Shakspeare was to sing. For Religion then, as it now and always
is, was the soul of Practice; the primary vital fact in men's life. And
remark here, as rather curious, that Middle-Age Catholicism was abolished,
so far as Acts of Parliament could abolish it, before Shakspeare, the
noblest product of it, made his appearance. He did make his appearance