All nature ministers to Shakspeare, as gladly as a mother to her child, while he "glances from heaven to earth, from earth to heaven." Whether he wishes to depict Romeo's love, or Hamlet's philosophy, or Miranda's innocence, or Perdita's simplicity, or Rosalind'splayfulness, or the sports of the Fairies, or Timon's misanthropy, or Macbeth's desolating ambition, or Lear's heart-rending frenzy—he has only to ask, and she vouchsafes every feeling and every passion with which he desires to actuate and invest his inimitable creations.
For six centuries, millions of readers, in and out of the church, had fed on religious romance, which had continually depreciated in merit, when John Bunyan was born, 1628, to gather up every remnant of excellence which had ever been expressed under that type; and having re-issued the essence of it all most divinely refined, he terminated legendary literature forever. With the same providential intent, in the same year that Michael Angelo died, William Shakspeare was born, and having perfected to the last degree every element which had accumulated during the lapsing of thirty centuries, romantic literature ended with the closing of his grave. Mid-way between Shakspeare and Bunyan, Milton lost his eyes; and Poetry, Freedom, and Religion, at the same time lost theirs for a season. But, behold! The splendors which fade along the western sky of the old world already foretoken the rising of a brighter day over the new.