The trunk was long ago in
extensive decay; every wind menaces it with overthrow; but the hearts
that bud and blossom upon it yearly send down to the earth and up to
the sky such a claim for resource as surrounds the dying trunk with
ever new layers of supporting growth. Equally are the thought, poetry,
rhetoric of by-gone times kept in significance by the perceiving, the
imagining, and the sense of a flowing symbolism in Nature, which our
own time brings to them. To make Homer alive to this age,--what an
expenditure of imagination, of pure feeling and penetration does it
demand! Let the Homeric heart or genius die out of mankind, and from
that moment the "Iliad" is but dissonance, the long melodious roll of
its echoes becomes a jarring chop of noises. What chiefly makes Homer
great is the vast ideal breadth of relationship in which he establishes
human beings. But he in whose narrow brain is no space for high
Olympus and deep Orcus,--he whose coarse fibre never felt the
shudder of the world at the shaking of the ambrosial locks, nor a
thrill in the air when a hero fails,--what can this grand stoop of the
ideal upon the actual world signify to him? To what but an ethical
genius in men can appeal for guest-rites be made by the noble
"Meditations" of Marcus Antoninus, or the exquisite, and perhaps
incomparable, "Christian Morals" of Sir Thomas Browne?
Appreciative genius is centrally the same with productive
genius; and it is the Shakspeare in men alone that prints Shakspeare
and reads him.
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