vast developing force, the love of nature, will at last receive its due as an educator of mind.
More than all other books, Shakespeare deals with universal nature, animate, and inanimate, material, mental, social, and moral, without and within. Oceans, and rills, worlds, and molecules, and all between. Mind infinite, and infinitesimal; life vegetable, and animal, with its aspects, modes, acting forces and effects, thoughts, affections, passions, motives and relations, shapes, hues, uses, and stages of growth and ecay: these and a myriad beside form each a thread in the tissue of Shakespeare's universal net work.
It is the testimony of two and a half centuries that no human productions have so variously expressed the inmost and utmost of nature, physical and mental, as those of Shakespeare. Five words of the inscription upon his monument, in the Church of Stratford-on-Avon proclaim this profound appreciation,—
Shakespeare with whom quick nature died.
While he yet lived the wise estimate in which his works were held by his own generation were thus chronicled. "They serve for the most common commentaries upon all the actions of our lives." Pope says of him, Shakespeare is not so much an imitator as an instrument of nature, and it is not so just to say, that he speaks for her as that she speaks through him.
Nature was in the order of time the first divine lesson to man, and the vast instrumentalities of inspiration, providence, and spiritual ministry have been superadded, yet all are lessons assigned by the same infinite teacher, the later not superseding, but amplifying and enforcing that original lesson.
The blessings that are always with us we most undervalue. Such await our birth, ply every grade of our growth, throng in through the senses, throb in every pulse, flash in every ray, ring in all tones, float in every odor, and savor, live in every thought, feeling, volition, and physical action, ever acting without us and upon us at each moment of our lives, and peopling even the vagaries of our dreams. These myriad influences do so seem parts of ourselves, that we see not what they are, life long educational forces, each a lesson and a teacher, sent to us on a divine mission.
These stimulants, acting through our external senses and our internal consciousness, are pulsations from the heart of universal nature, from the constitution and laws of things and of mind. This universal nature is a revalation of God's will to man upon the subject of education. To each individual he has delivered a copy. Let him con it well. This unwritten revelation, is in two testaments. One is born in every man—the faculties of his own being, the other lies all around him through his senses.
