again over the sea of literature, heaven only knows whither, in search of a school of authors yet, alas! unborn.  For the true literature of the nineteenth century, the literature which shall set forth in worthy strains the relation of the two greatest facts, namely, of the universe and of Christ, which shall transfigure all our enlarged knowledge of science and of society, of nature, of art, and man, with the eternal truths of the gospel, that poetry of the future is not yet here:  but it is coming, ay even at the doors, when this great era shall become conscious of its high vocation, and the author too shall claim his priestly calling, and the poets of the world, like the kingdoms of the world, shall become the poets of God and of His Christ.

But to return.  Should we not rather in education follow that method which Providence has already mapped out for us?  If we are bound, as of course we are, to teach our pupils to breathe freely on the highest mountain-peaks of Shakespeare’s art, how can we more certainly train them to do so, than by leading them along the same upward path by which Shakespeare himself rose—­through the various changes of taste, the gradual developments of literature, through which the English mind had been passing before Shakespeare’s time?  For there was a literature before Shakespeare.  Had there not been, neither would there have been a Shakespeare.  Critics are now beginning to see that the old fancy which made Shakespeare spring up at once, a self-perfected poet, like Minerva full-armed from the head of Jove, was a superstition of pedants, who neither knew the ages before the great poet, nor the man himself, except that little of him which seemed to square with their shallow mechanical taste.  The old fairy superstition, the old legends and ballads, the old chronicles of feudal war and chivalry, the earlier moralities and mysteries, and tragi-comic attempts—­these were the roots of his poetic tree—­they must be the roots of any literary education which can teach us to appreciate him.  These fed Shakespeare’s youth; why should they not feed our children’s?  Why indeed?  That inborn delight of the young in all that is marvellous and fantastic—­has that a merely evil root?  No surely!  It is a most pure part of their spiritual nature; a part of “the heaven which lies about us in our infancy;” angel-wings with which the free child leaps the prison-walls of sense and custom, and the drudgery of earthly life—­like the wild dreams of childhood, it is a God-appointed means for keeping alive what noble Wordsworth calls

      those obstinate questionings
   Of sense and outward things,
   Fallings from us, vanishings;
   Blank misgivings of a creature
Moving about in worlds not realised;

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by which

   Though inland far we be,
   Our souls have sight of that immortal sea
   Which brought us hither: 
   Can in a moment travel thither,
And see the children sporting on the shore,
And hear the mighty waters rolling evermore.