meaning. Our ideals broaden to suit the wide
day in which we live. We crave, not cloistered
virtue—it is impossible any longer to keep
the cloister—but a robust spirit that shall
take the air in the great world, know men in all their
kinds, choose its way amid the bustle with all self-possession,
with wise genuineness, in calmness, and yet with the
quick eye of interest and the quick pulse of power.
It is again a day for Shakespeare’s spirit—a
day more various, more ardent, more provoking to valor
and every large design, even than “the spacious
times of great Elizabeth,” when all the world
seemed new; and if we cannot find another bard, come
out of a new Warwickshire, to hold once more the mirror
up to nature, it will not be because the stage is not
set for him. The time is such an one as he might
rejoice to look upon; and if we would serve it as
it should be served, we should seek to be human after
his wide-eyed sort. The serenity of power; the
naturalness that is nature’s poise and mark of
genuineness; the unsleeping interest in all affairs,
all fancies, all things believed or done; the catholic
understanding, tolerance, enjoyment, of all classes
and conditions of men; the conceiving imagination,
the planning purpose, the creating thought, the wholesome,
laughing humor, the quiet insight, the universal coinage
of the brain—are not these the marvelous
gifts and qualities we mark in Shakespeare when we
call him the greatest among men? And shall not
these rounded and perfect powers serve us as our ideal
of what it is to be a finished human being?
We live for our own age—an age like Shakespeare’s,
when an old world is passing away, a new world coming
in—an age of new speculation and every
new adventure of the mind; a full stage, an intricate
plot, a universal play of passion, an outcome no man
can foresee. It is to this world, this sweep of
action, that our understandings must be stretched
and fitted; it is in this age we must show our human
quality. We must measure ourselves by the task,
accept the pace set for us, make shift to know what
we are about. How free and liberal should be
the scale of our sympathy, how catholic our understanding
of the world in which we live, how poised and masterful
our action in the midst of so great affairs!
We should school our ears to know the voices that are
genuine, our thought to take the truth when it is
spoken, our spirits to feel the zest of the day.
It is within our choice to be mean company or with
great, to consort with the wise or with the foolish,
now that the great world has spoken to us in the literature
of all tongues and voices. The best selected human
nature will tell in the making of the future, and the
art of being human is the art of freedom and of force.
The End.