A wave of enthusiasm seemed to break over England; all that was poetical in the people found expression in deed or word. Everything tasted of it--sermons and speeches as well as verses. The travelers could not write a dry journal, but they somehow blundered into a poetical phrase that clings to the memory like a perfume. The sensations of men were as fresh as Adam’s, and the words they found to speak them in could be beautiful or fragrant with as little effort as it costs violets to be blue. It is a remarkable fact that the poetry of Shakspeare is at the same time more English and more universally human than any that was ever written. The two great poets who came before Shakspeare had both of them enlarged the revenues of the English muse. Chaucer had added character and incident, and had shown the capacities of the language and of the metre. Spenser left it enriched with a luxury of diction, with harmony of verse, and with the lovely images of the classical mythology. But Shakspeare came in like an unthrift heir. He squandered everything. From king to clown he used up all character; there is no passion, or fancy, or feeling that he has not spent; no question of philosophy, morals, politics, or metaphysics that he has not solved; he poured out all the golden accumulations of diction like water. And his younger brethren, the other dramatists, helped him. What was there left? Certainly, this wonderful being has expressed every sentiment, every thought, that is universal in its relations. All the poetry of this world he exhausted. Accordingly, in the time immediately following this splendidly imaginative period, we find only a development of fancy under one or other of its disguises. Fancy deals with limited and personal experiences, and interests us by the grace or perfectness of its expression of these. The Dramatists were tremendously in earnest, as they had need to be, to please a people who were getting in earnest themselves. But now the time itself was preparing a drama, and on no mimic scene, but with England for a stage and with all Europe for spectators. A real historical play was in rehearsal, no petty war of York and Lancaster, but the death-grapple of two eras. The time was in travail with the Ishmael of Puritanism who, exiled from his father’s house, was to found here in this Western wilderness an empire for himself and his wandering descendants. England herself was turning poet, and would add her rhapsody to the great epic of the nations.