"Vast objects of remote altitude," says Landor, "must be looked at a long while before they are ascertained. Ages are the telescope tubes that must be lengthened out for Shakespeare; and generations of men serve but as single witnesses to his claims." "Shakespeare," said Coleridge, "is of no age--nor, I may add, of any religion, or party, or profession. The body and substance of his works came out of the unfathomable depths of his own oceanic mind; his observation and reading supplied him with the drapery of his figures." "The sand heaped by one flood," says Dr. Johnson, "is scattered by another; but the rock always continues in its place. The stream of time, which is continually washing the dissoluble fabrics of other poets, passes without injury by the adamant of Shakespeare." "Milton is not," says De Quincey, "an author amongst authors, not a poet amongst poets, but a power amongst powers; and the Paradise Lost is not a book amongst books, not a poem amongst poems, but a central force amongst forces." Landor, in his Imaginary Conversations, makes Marvell thus to address Marten: "Hast thou not sat convivially with Oliver Cromwell? Hast thou not conversed familiarly with the only man greater than he, John Milton? One was ambitious of perishable power, the other of imperishable glory; both have attained their aim." Hazlitt and Coleridge being together, some comparison was introduced between Shakespeare and Milton. Coleridge said "he hardly knew which to prefer. Shakespeare seemed to him a mere stripling in the art; he was as tall and as strong, with infinitely more activity than Milton, but he never appeared to have come to man's estate; or if he had, he would not have been a man, but a monster." "A rib of Shakespeare," said Landor, "would have made a Milton; the same portion of Milton, all poets born ever since." Said Goethe, "Would you see Shakespeare's intellect unfettered, read Troilus and Cressida, and see how he uses the materials of the Iliad in his fashion." Said Coleridge, "Compare Nestor, Ajax, Achilles, etc., in the Troilus and Cressida of Shakespeare, with their namesakes in the Iliad. The old heroes seem all to have been at school ever since." "It was really Voltaire," said Goethe, "who excited such minds as Diderot, D'Alembert, and Beaumarchais; for to be somewhat near him a man needed to be much, and could take no holidays." "To have seen such a man as Dr. Johnson," said Dr. Campbell, "was a thing to talk of a century hence." "Nature," said Heine, "wanted to see how she looked, and she created Goethe." "Were Byron now alive, and Burns," said Hawthorne, "the first would come from his ancestral abbey, flinging aside, although unwillingly, the inherited honors of a thousand years, to take the arm of the mighty peasant who grew immortal while he stooped behind his plow."