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He loved his own English tongue, he was skilled in English song, his last work was a translation into English of the Gospel of St. John, and almost the last words that broke from his lips were some English rimes upon death. But the noblest proof of his love of England lies in the work which immortalizes his name.
Wordsworth pictures the life of shepherds and dalesmen. Byron's lines ring with a cry of liberty for all, and Shelley immortalizes the dreams of a universal brotherhood of man. Keats, the poet of the beautiful, passed away before he heard clearly the message of "the still sad music of humanity."
As for Moliere, he is a poor fellow, who never attains the exuberance of Shakespeare, nor the invention that immortalizes Cervantes. But his taste is better than Shakespeare's and he is more social, more modern than Cervantes. The half-century or more that separates the work of Cervantes from that of Moliere, is not sufficient to explain this modernity.
They were still the "rose and nightingale" whom Heine immortalizes in his "Lutetia," "the rose the nightingale among flowers, the nightingale the rose among birds."
His distinguishing excellence as an historian is his sagacity and impartiality. Nothing escapes his penetrating eye; and he inflicts merited chastisement on the tyrants who reveled in the prostrated liberties of his country, while he immortalizes those few who were faithful to duty and conscience in a degenerate age. But his writings were not so popular as those of Livy.
And that reminds me: This, after all, is a foreword to Green Mansions the romance of the bird-girl Rima a story actual yet fantastic, which immortalizes, I think, as passionate a love of all beautiful things as ever was in the heart of man. Somewhere Hudson says: "The sense of the beautiful is God's best gift to the human soul."
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