present age exceeds its predecessors in marvel in proportion as the victories of the intellect are in a world of finer secrecy than any horizon veils, and build an empire of greater breadth and endurance than any monarch or sovereign people or domineering race selfishly achieves; its victories are in the unseen of force and thought, and it brings among men the undecaying empire of knowledge, as inexpugnable as the mind in man and as inappropriable as light and air. Here, as elsewhere, it is the sensual eye that sees the sensual thing, but the spiritual eye spiritually discerns. It is romance that adds this "precious seeing" to the eye. Openness to the call, capability of the passion, and character, so sensitized and moulded in individuals and made hereditary in a civilization and a race and idealized in conscience, constitute the motor-genius of a nation, which is its finding faculty; and the appreciation of results and putting them to the use of men make its conserving and positive power. These two, indistinguishably married and blended, are the English genius. A positive genius following a romantic lead, a romantic genius yielding a positive good, equally describe it from opposed points of view; yet in the finer spirits and in the long age the romantic temperament is felt to be the fertilizing element, to be character as opposed to performance. Greatness lies always in the unaccomplished deed, as in the lonely anecdote of Newton: "I do not know what I may appear to the world, but to myself I seem to have been only like a boy playing on the seashore, and diverting myself in now and then finding a smoother pebble, or a prettier shell than ordinary, whilst the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me." So Tennyson with his "wages of going on," and Sir John Franklin and Gordon in their lives. This spiritual breath of the nation in all its activities through centuries is the breath of its literature, there embodied in its finer being and applied to the highest uses for the civilization and culture of the nation by truth and art. In English literary history, and in its men of genius taken individually, the positive or the romantic may predominate, each in its own moment; but the conspectus of the whole assigns to each its true levels. Romanticism condensed in character, which is the creation of the highest poetic genius, the rarest work of man, has its illustrative example in Shakespeare, the first of all writers; he followed it through all its modes, and perhaps its simplest types are Henry IV for action, Romeo for passion, and Hamlet, which is the romance of thought. Before Shakespeare, Spenser closed the earliest age, which had been shaped by a diffused romantic tradition, inherited from mediævalism, though in its later career masked under Renaissance forms; and since Shakespeare, a similar diffused romantic prescience, in the region of the common life and of revolutionary causes most