So in the
_Tempest_, Ariel is the spirit of the air and Caliban of the earth,
ministering, with more or less of unwillingness, to man's necessities.
Shakspere is the most universal of writers. He touches more men at more
points than Homer, or Dante, or Goethe. The deepest wisdom, the sweetest
poetry, the widest range of character, are combined in his plays. He
made the English language an organ of expression unexcelled in the
history of literature. Yet he is not an English poet simply, but a
world-poet. Germany has made him her own, and the Latin races, though at
first hindered in a true appreciation of him by the canons of classical
taste, have at length learned to know him. An ever-growing mass of
Shakespearian literature, in the way of comment and interpretation,
critical, textual, historical, or illustrative, testifies to the
durability and growth of his fame. Above all, his plays still keep, and
probably always will keep, the stage. It is common to speak of
Shakespeare and the other Elizabethan dramatists as if they stood, in
some sense, on a level. But in truth there is an almost measureless
distance between him and all his contemporaries. The rest shared with
him in the mighty influences of the age. Their plays are touched here
and there with the power and splendor of which they were all joint
heirs.
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