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No wild Saint Dominics and Thebaid Eremites, there had been no melodious Dante; rough Practical Endeavor, Scandinavian and other, from Odin to Walter Raleigh, from Ulfila to Cranmer, enabled Shakspeare to speak. Nay the finished Poet, I remark sometimes, is a symptom that his epoch itself has reached perfection and is finished; that before long there will be a new epoch, new Reformers needed.
He laboured in the Biblioteca Ambrosiana, and succeeded in exhuming from darkness and dust the treasures which neglect and superstition had buried there. I saw, too, in the Biblioteca Ambrosiana, fragments of the version of the Bible made in the middle of the fourth century, by Ulfila, bishop of the Mæsogoths. The labours of the bishop underwent a strange dispersion.
He gives us this unconscious glimpse of himself at work on this loftiest and most fruitful of tasks, which Jerome had first accomplished for Latin Christendom, Ulfila for our Scandinavian forefathers, Wiclif for the English, and Luther for the Germans of the time. "Now I must mention some of the difficulties under which we labour, particularly myself.
Considering how human things circulate, each inextricably in communion with all, how the word I speak to you to-day is borrowed, not from Ulfila the Moesogoth only, but from all men since the first man began to speak, I find no similitude so true as this of a Tree. Beautiful; altogether beautiful and great. The "Machine of the Universe," alas, do but think of that in contrast!
Had there been no Moesogothic Ulfila, there had been no English Shakspeare, or a different one. Simpleton! It was Tubal-cain that made thy very Tailor's needle, and sewed that court-suit of thine. "Yes, truly, if Nature is one, and a living indivisible whole, much more is Mankind, the Image that reflects and creates Nature, without which Nature were not.
If we were accurate chroniclers, we should have to go back to Aristotle and the Chaldeans to show the origin and purpose of these little offices, just as Carlyle has to unearth Ulfila the Moesogoth to explain a word he uses to his butter-man. The world is so new, after all, and things so inextricably tangled up in it!
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