own age is he the interpreter, but of man to man in
all ages. For change as the world may in outward
aspect, with the rise and fall of empires,--change as
men may, from generation to generation, in know-
ledge, belief, and manners,--human nature remains
unalterable in its elements, unchanged from age to
age; and it is human nature, under its various guises,
with which the great poets deal.

The Iliad and the Odyssey do not become antiquated
to us. The characters of Shakespeare are perpetually
modern. Homer, Dante, Shakespeare stand alone in
the closeness of their relation to nature. Each after
his own manner gives us a view of life, as seen by the
poetic imagination, such as no other poet has given to
us. Homer, first of all poets, shows us individual per.
sonages sharply defined, but in the early stages of
intellectual and moral development,--the first repre-
sentatives of the race at its conscious entrance upon
the path of progress, with simple motives, simple the-
ories of existence, simple and limited experience. He
is plain and direct in the presentation of life, and in
the substance no less than in the expression of his
thought.

In Shakespeare's work the individual man is no less
sharply defined, no less true to nature, but the long
procession of his personages is wholly different in
effect from that of the Iliad and the Odyssey. They
have lost the simplicity of the older race; they are the
products of a longer and more varied experience; they
have become more complex. And Shakespeare is plain
and direct neither in the substance of his thought nor
in the expression of it. The world has grown older,
and in the evolution of his nature man has become

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