Slender in numbers, but eager, versatile, and
intense, they gave us the richest, most varied, and most stimulating of
all literatures.
When poetry and art reappeared after the long night of the Dark Ages,
their most splendid blossoms flowered in the small republics of Italy.
In modern Europe what do we not owe to little Switzerland, lighting the
torch of freedom 600 years ago and keeping it alight through all the
centuries when despotic monarchies held the rest of the European
Continent? And what to free Holland, with her great men of learning and
her painters surpassing those of all other countries save Italy?
So the small Scandinavian nations have given to the world famous men of
science, from Linnaeus downward; poets like Tegnor and Bjoernson;
scholars like Madvig; dauntless explorers like Fridtjof Nansen.
England had in the age of Shakespeare, Bacon, and Milton a population
little larger than that of Bulgaria today. The United States in the days
of Washington and Franklin and Jefferson and Hamilton and Marshall
counted fewer inhabitants than Denmark or Greece. In the most brilliant
generations of German literature and thought, the age of Kant and
Lessing and Goethe, of Hegel and Schiller and Fichte, there was no real
German State at all, but a congeries of principalities and free
cities--independent centres of intellectual life in which letters and
science produced a richer crop than the two succeeding generations have
raised, just as Great Britain also, with eight times the population of
the year 1600, has had no more Shakespeares or Miltons.
Pages:
410
411
412
413
414
415
416
417
418
419
420
421
422
423
424
425
426
427
428
429
430
431
432
433
434