In the first place, it has all books. It reprints the wisdom
of the world. How can the age be a bad one, which gives me Plato and
Paul and Plutarch, St. Augustine, Spinoza, Chapman, Beaumont and
Fletcher, Donne and Sir Thomas Browne, beside its own riches? Our
presses groan every year with new editions of all the select pieces
of the first of mankind, -- meditations, history, classifications,
opinions, epics, lyrics, which the age adopts by quoting them. If we
should designate favorite studies in which the age delights more than
in the rest of this great mass of the permanent literature of the
human race, one or two instances would be conspicuous. First; the
prodigious growth and influence of the genius of Shakspeare, in the
last one hundred and fifty years, is itself a fact of the first
importance. It almost alone has called out the genius of the German
nation into an activity, which spreading from the poetic into the
scientific, religious, and philosophical domains, has made theirs now
at last the paramount intellectual influence of the world, reacting
with great energy on England and America.
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