Elihu Burritt

“ Popular editions of Shakespeare are the order of the day. For the first time the common people begin to know him. Such is the promise of 1867. What is being done in England and America to familiarize the masses with his writings is repeated on a smaller scale on the Continent of Europe. Cheap editions in German and French have been put recently in circulation. Doubtless within a half century lie will be read in every other language in Christendom. His works never had more vitality than at the present moment, nor such a wide breathing space among men. ”

“ STRATFORD-UPON-AVON AND SHAKESPEARE; HIS FAME, PAST AND PROSPECTIVE.
AND this is Stratford-upon-Avon? Is there another town in Christendom to equal human memory? Let him who thinks he can say there is tell us where the like may be found. London is the birth-and-burial place of a large number of distinguished poets, philosophers, statesmen, and heroes. Their lives make for it a nebulous lustre. ”

“ The rooms are small, and very low between joints; still the one assigned by tradition as the birthplace of the great poet is large enough for the greatest of men to be born in. Its ceiling overhead and side walls, however, afford too scant tablet-space for the registry of the names of all who have sought thus to leave their cards in homage of the illustrious memory. ”

“ It is a wonder that a man of such genius could have died less than two centuries and a half ago, and have left a character so completely shut in and barred against "the peering littlenesses" of speering, yellow-eyed curiosity. A soft, still blue, of a hundred years deep, surrounds his personal being. ”

“ They never knew how to talk and walk and act with the majesty that befitted a king until he taught them. Yet, how little personal history he made for himself! Not half as many footprints of his personality can be found as his father's made at Stratford. ”

“ The orbits of their brilliant careers overlap upon each other, so that their individual paths of light, intersecting in their common illumination, like netted sunbeams, do not make any vivid or distinctive lines over the face or over the history of the great city. ”

“ The population of the whole island hardly equalled that of the State of New York to-day. Just below the point of diffluence, about a quarter of a century before England put forth the first rivulet from the river of her being and history to fill the fountain of a new national existence in the Western World. Shakespeare was at his culm111ation as a poet. We Americans meet him first when we trace back our history to its origin. He of all the old masters stands in the very doorway of "Our Old Home" to welcome us with the radiant smile of his genius. ”