And now think of the amplitude of this man's soul! Within the immense space which stretches between Dogberry or Launcelot Gobbo and Imogen or Cordelia, lies the Shakespearian world. No other man ever exhibited such philosophic comprehensiveness, but philosophic comprehensiveness is often displayed apart from creative comprehensiveness, and along the whole vast line of facts, laws, analogies, and relations that Shakespeare's intellect extended, his perceptions were vital, his insight was creative, his thoughts flowed in forms. And now was he proud of his transcendent superiorities? Did he think that he had exhausted all that can appear before the sight of the eye and the sight of the soul? No. The immeasurable opulence of the undiscovered and undiscerned regions of existence was never felt with more reverent humility than by this discoverer, who had seen in rapturous vision so many new worlds open on his view. In the play which perhaps best indicates the ecstatic action of his mind, and which is alive in every part with that fiery sense of unlimited power which the mood of ecstasy gives,--in the play of "Antony and Cleopatra," he has put into the mouth of the Soothsayer what seems to have been his own modest judgment of the extent of his glance into the universe of matter and mind:-- "In Nature's infinite book of secrecy A little I can read!" LONGFELLOW'S TRANSLATION OF DANTE'S DIVINA COMMEDIA. In the North American Review for March, 1809, we read of Cary's Dante: "This we can pronounce, with confidence, to be the most literal translation in poetry in our language." "As to Cary," writes Prescott in 1824, "I think Dante would have given him a place in his ninth heaven, if he could have foreseen his translation. It is most astonishing, giving not only the literal corresponding phrase, but the spirit of the original, the true Dantesque manner. It should be cited as an evidence of the compactness, the pliability, the sweetness of the English tongue." If we turn to English scholars, we shall find them holding the same language, and equally ready to assure you that you may confidently accept Cary's version as a faithful transcript of the spirit and letter of the original. And this was the theory of translation throughout almost the first half of the present century. Cary's position in 1839 was higher even than it was in 1824. With many other claims to respect, he was still best known as the translator of Dante.