Shakespeare: A Biographic Æsthetic Study (Classic Reprint)

Excerpt from Shakespeare: A Biographic Æsthetic Study

Nature can afford to be a spendthrift, allow ing myriads of young lives to be wasted, SO teeming is she with new births, so deep her store of mysterious life-germs. But does She allow any of her capital buds to be cut Off in infancy When among the survivors (who are a vast ma]or1ty) we find so few prime men, men Of creative calibre, great poets, thinkers, dis coverers, statesmen; when we remember that during the long Napoleonic wars but two gen erals earned the' first rank as masters of their craft, Napoleon and Wellington; when we re flect how rare are Cavours and Washingtons, how difficult it continues to be for us to find a man eminently suited to be the head of our republic, a man able and just, watchful and scrupulous, temperate and energetic when we behold everywhere this dearth of high gifts, may we not conclude that few, if any, infants Of best promise are sacrificed at the threshold of life, and that probably the native excellence of Such involves a self-protecting vitality to re sist physical déstruction?

The air inbreathed by3 the infant that lay asleep near his anxious mother was feeding a brain destined to be the seat Of a deeper and fuller consciousness than ever quickened a human mind. If the vitality through which the soul indues itself with corporeal consistence be not strong enough to insure the material form against earthly disease, a soul of this excep tional power, as a' resplendent boon from the soul of souls, will be Shielded from above, and the mpdest cottage in Henley Street would have been encircled with a sanitary belt Of guardian angels.

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