I came upon a passage as grand as anything in “Paradise Lost,”—­his description of Plato’s archetypal man, the vast ideal of the human race, eternal, incorrupt, coeval with the stars, dwelling either in the sidereal spaces, or among the Lethean mansions of souls unborn, or pacing the unexplored confines of the habitable globe.  There stood the majestic image, veiled in a dead language, yet still visible; and it was as if one of the poet’s own sylvan groves had been suddenly cut down, and opened a view of Olympus.  Then all these present fascinating trivialities of war and diplomacy ebbed away, like Greece and Rome before them, and there seemed nothing real in the universe but Plato’s archetypal man.

Indeed, it is the same with all contemporary notorieties.  In all free governments, especially, it is the habit to overrate the dramatis personae of the hour.  How empty to us are now the names of the great politicians of the last generation, as Crawford and Lowndes!—­yet it is but a few years since these men filled in the public ear as large a space as Clay or Calhoun afterwards, and when they died, the race of the giants was thought ended.  The path to oblivion of these later idols is just as sure; even Webster will be to the next age but a mighty tradition, and all that he has left will seem no more commensurate with his fame than will his statue by Powers.  If anything preserves the statesmen of to-day, it will be only because we are coming to a contest of more vital principles, which may better embalm the men.  Of all gifts, eloquence is the most short-lived.  The most accomplished orator fades forgotten, and his laurels pass to some hoarse, inaudible Burke, accounted rather a bore during his lifetime, and possessed of a faculty of scattering, not convincing, the members of the House.  “After all,” said the brilliant Choate, with melancholy foreboding, “a book is the only immortality.”

So few men in any age are born with a marked gift for literary expression, so few of this number have access to high culture, so few even of these have the personal nobleness to use their powers well, and this small band is finally so decimated by disease and manifold disaster, that it makes one shudder to observe how little of the embodied intellect of any age is left behind.  Literature is attar of roses, one distilled drop from a million blossoms.  Think how Spain and Portugal once divided the globe between them in a treaty, when England was a petty kingdom of illiterate tribes!—­and now all Spain is condensed for us into Cervantes, and all Portugal into the fading fame of the unread Camoens.  The long magnificence of Italian culture has left us only I Quattro Poeti, the Four Poets.  The difference between Shakspeare and his contemporaries is not that he is read twice, ten times, a hundred times as much as they:  it is an absolute difference; he is read, and they are only printed.