Now let us take a leap as we did with prose, and ‘taking off’ from the Nut-Brown Maid’s artless confession,

     in my mind, of all mankind
     I love but you alone,

let us alight on a sonnet of Shakespeare’s—­

     Thy bosom is endeared with all hearts
      Which I by lacking have supposed dead: 
     And there reigns Love, and all Love’s loving parts,
      And all those friends which I thought buried. 
     How many a holy and obsequious tear
      Hath dear religious love stolen from mine eye
     As interest of the dead!—­which now appear
      But things removed, that hidden in thee lie. 
     Thou art the grave where buried love doth live,
      Hung with the trophies of my lovers gone,
     Who all their parts of me to thee did give;
       That due of many now is mine alone: 
       Their images I loved I view in thee,
       And thou, all they, hast all the all of me.

What a new way of talking about love!  Not a happier way—­there is less of heart’s-ease in these doubts, delicacies, subtleties—­but how much more thoughtful!  How has our Nut-Brown Maid eaten of the tree of knowledge!

Well, there happened a Shakespeare, to do this for English Verse:  and Shakespeare was a miracle which I cheerfully leave others to rationalise for you, having, for my own part and so far as I have fared in life, found more profit in a capacity for simple wonder.

But I can tell you how the path was made straight to that miracle.  The shock of the New Learning upon Europe awoke men and unsealed men’s eyes—­unsealed the eyes of Englishmen in particular—­to discover a literature, and the finest in the world, which habitually philosophised life:  a literature which, whether in a chorus of Sophocles or a talk reported by Plato, or in a ribald page of Aristophanes or in a knotty chapter of Thucydides, was in one guise or another for ever asking Why? ‘What is man doing here, and why is he doing it?’ ’What is his purpose? his destiny?’ ’How stands he towards those unseen powers—­call them the gods, or whatever you will—­that guide and thwart, provoke, madden, control him so mysteriously?’ ’What are these things we call good and evil, life, love, death?’

These are questions which, once raised, haunt Man until he finds an answer—­some sort of answer to satisfy him.  Englishmen, hitherto content with the Church’s answers but now aware of this great literature which answered so differently—­and having other reasons to suspect what the Church said and did—­grew aware that their literature had been as a child at play.  It had never philosophised good and evil, life, love or death:  it had no literary forms for doing this; it had not even the vocabulary.  So our ancestors saw that to catch up their lee-way—­to make their report worthy of this wonderful, alluring discovery—­new literary forms had to be invented—­new,