I heard a song of love, and tenderness, and sadness, and beauty, sweeter than the song of a nightingale. It was breathed from the soul of Robert Burns. I heard a song of deepest passion surging like the tempest-tossed waves of the sea. It was the restless spirit of Lord Byron.

I heard a mournful melody of despairing love, full of that wild, mad, hopeless longing of a bereaved soul which the mid-night raven mocked at with that bitterest of all words—"Nevermore!" It was the weird threnody of the brilliant, but ill-starred Poe, who, like a meteor, blazed but for a moment, dazzling a hemisphere, and then went out forever in the darkness of death.

Then I was exalted, and lifted into the serene sunlight of peace, as I listened to the spirit of faith, pouring out in the songs of our own immortal Longfellow.

With Milton I walked the scented isles of long lost Paradise, and caught the odor of its bloom, and the swell of its music. He led me through its rose brakes, and under the vermilion and flame of its orchids and honeysuckles, down to the margin of the limpid river, where the water lilies slept in fadeless beauty, and the lotus nodded to the rippling waves; and there, under a bridal arch of orange blossoms, cordoned by palms and many-colored flowers, I saw a vision of bliss and beauty from which Satan turned away with an envy that stabbed him with pangs unfelt before in hell! It was earth's first vision of wedded love.

But the horizon of Shakespeare was broader than them all. There is no depth which he has not sounded, no height which he has not measured. He walked in the gardens of the intellectual gods and gathered sweets for the soul from a thousand unwithering flowers. He caught music from the spheres, and beauty from ten thousand fields of light. His brain was a mighty loom. His genius gathered and classified, his imagination spun and wove; the flying shuttle of his fancy delivered to the warp of wisdom and philosophy the shining threads spun from the fibres of human hearts and human experience; and with his wondrous woof of pictured tapestries, he clothed all thought in the bridal robes of immortality. His mind was a resistless flood that deluged the world of literature with its glory. The succeeding poets are but survivors as by the ark, and, like the ancient dove, they gather and weave into garlands only the "flotsam" of beauty which floats on the bosom of the Shakespearean flood.

Oh, Shakespeare, archangel of poetry! The light from thy wings drowns the stars and flashes thy glory on the civilizations of the whole world!

All honor to the poets and philosophers and painters and sculptors and musicians of the world! They are its honeybees; its songbirds; its carrier doves, its ministering angels.