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lengths before the literary paleontologist, fossilized, calcareous, dead? 

 It is because these immortal cries of Ancient Hellas glow with inex- 

 tinguishable fire, gleam like burning coals, are surcharged with human 

 heat and passion and yearning, as the opal is surcharged with radi- 

 ancy. Instantly such lines, such meters, such epigrams yield up their 

 prismatic glory to the sympathetic soul that feels in them the heat 

 still glowing, the soul still fired with immortal youth, the deathless 

 pang, the eternal music. Sappho, Simonides, the imprisoned Danae 

 still speak from unperishing palimpsest or papyrus because of the Love 

 that was in them, mystic, inexplicable, beyond the definition of 

 philologer or rhetorician, simply alive, and just as much so to-day as 

 in that measureless yesterday when Herodotus read his great prose- 

 poem to assembled thousands at the Grecian games. 



The essential characteristics indeed of this great literature on which 

 I have just touched are the mass of Light, and the mass of Love, of 

 Heat, of heart in it; it could never have lived these three thousand 

 years and have been /cr^a es d' which it is, without this supreme 

 central vitalizing principle. And men dip into it again and again as 

 they dip their faces into a clear pool of crystal water, for refreshment, 

 for sustenance, for regeneration, for the divine restfulness that flows 

 from contact with any living thing that has ozone in it. 



What living thing can grow without the light? What living thing 

 can grow without heat? What living thing can grow without Life? 



Herder's passionate devotion to his contemporaries, to the young 

 Goethe, to the wide fields of many literatures in which he was versed, 

 to the many-fountained well-springs of young vigor and national 

 strength which he found in the ballad-poetry of the nations, shows 

 that the word Leben was even more essential to his trilogy, as ex- 

 pressing the concentrated essence of his creed, than the other two, 

 fundamental as they, too, were. 



And of Life what better definition is there than the simple word 

 Shakespeare? 



At this magic word there springs into being a world shading down 

 from superhuman to infinitesimal, filled with creatures that laugh and 

 sing and breathe and play, so full of life that Life itself might be 

 deceived, creatures breaking spontaneously into smiles or tears, crea- 

 tures from whom the life's blood starts at the prick of a needle, gay, 

 sad, pungent, witty, argumentative, deathless clowns or dying gladia- 

 tors, men and women and children torn from palace and hut, from 

 throne and cobbler's stool, from field and Fairyland, chattering, 

 suffering, loving, hating, the incarnate imagery of Life itself. All this 

 busy multitude streaming in endless panorama from the quartos and 

 folios as out of prison-gates, an airy infinitude of souls new-born into 

 the tumultuous century of Tudor and Stuart, but belonging to all 

 time, the children of Shakespeare : how they stream, and dance, and 



