Rensselaer Republican, Volume 26, Number 37, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 10 May 1894 — THE UNPARALLELED MAN. [ARTICLE]

THE UNPARALLELED MAN.

Easily the Greatest Name In th® Annals of History. Tho astonishing ease with which Shakespeare seems to have raised hie mighly lines and fine humanities is the greatest discouragement to subsequent literature. Compare hint to Tennyson, .for instance, who is still living, and has been made a baron! Tennyson has crammed himself full of culture, has weighed his lines and tried all manner of flutes and bugles, but we behold at last one who has rather buried literature and its period instead of having revived them. It may be that Tennyson is to be the last Euglish poet. There is certainly no great occasion for many more. Shakespeare never reached a higher dignity than that of “gentleman,” and even that was probably an ascription of his posterity. He lived in a time when the past still stood colossal and the future was like a new-born babe within the ruins of feudal violence and power. He lived after the reformation, when Europe was on the eve of its last mighty war to settle the status of Luther and the popes. After Shakespeare was placed in his tomb there was war in Germany for thirty year 3 between the Lutheran and the Holy Roman empire. Great men were yet to be, perhaps tho greatest of all Englishmen as a ruler —Cromwell. The apprehension of Shakespeare, naturally healthy and earnest, became heightened by the vast surroundings until he rose above theologies and above literature itself, and became like a theologian of the first order, like Moses or Mohammed, or Calvin or Luther, all of them literary men. He discerned that man, with all his lofty purposes, was a mere puppet. He had lived to know that the worlds thornselves were heid in check by other worlds, and that gravity governed everywhere. Ho lived a hundred years behind Columbus, and yet had been intimate with such home events as the murder of Darnioy, the execution of Queen Elizabeth’s mother, tho massacre of St. Bartholomew and the conclusion of the Wars of the Roses. It was a time when the wisest man felt the most ignorance and the most humility, and only the fool was confident that he had the key to naluro and God. Shakespeare, therefore, generally represents man in his subject condtiion—the trifler, tho lover, y tho melancholy prince. His appreciation has been for about 250 years confined to the English nations; now it is beginning to go abroad. His statuo stands in the streets of Paris. The Germans almost regard Shakespeare as one of themselves. Two facts stand out together which the man of thought will long connect with each other—that Shakespeare was unparallelled and that the nation of men to which he belonged has constructed and maintained the greatest empire of history. This Englishman and these Englishmen explain each other. —Gath.