This is yet the only true morality known. A man is right and invincible, while he joins himself to the great deep law of the world, in spite of all superficial laws, temporary appearances, profit-and-loss calculations. This is the soul of Islam, and is properly also the soul of Christianity. We are to receive whatever befalls us as sent from God above. Islam means in its way the denial of self, annihilation of self. This is yet the highest wisdom that Heaven has revealed to our earth. In Mohammed, and in his Koran, I find first of all sincerity, the total freedom from cant. For these twelve centuries his religion has been the guidance of a fifth part of mankind, and, above all, it has been a religion heartily believed. The Arab nation was a poor shepherd people; a hero-prophet was sent down to them; within one century afterwards Arabia is at Grenada on this hand, at Delhi on that! _III.--The Hero as Poet_ The hero as divinity and as prophet are productions of old ages, not to be repeated in the new. We are now to see our hero in the less ambitious, but also less questionable, character of poet. For the hero can be poet, prophet, king, priest, or what you will, according to the kind of world he finds himself born into. I have no notion of a truly great man that could not be all sorts of men. Indeed, the poet and prophet, participators in the open secret of the universe, are one; though the prophet has seized the sacred mystery rather on its moral side, and the poet on the æsthetic side. Poetry is essentially a song; its thoughts are musical not in word only, but in heart and in substance. Shakespeare and Dante are our two canonised poets; they dwell apart, none equal, none second to them. Dante's book was written, in banishment, with his heart's blood. His great soul, homeless on earth, made its home more and more in that awful other world. The three kingdoms--_Inferno_, _Purgatorio_, _Paradiso_--are like compartments of a great supernatural world-cathedral, piled up there, stern, solemn, awful; Dante's world of souls. It is the sincerest of all poems. Sincerity here, too, we find to be the measure of worth. Intensity is the prevailing character of his genius; his greatness lies in fiery emphasis and depth; it is seen even in the graphic vividness of his painting. Dante burns as a pure star, fixed in the firmament, at which the great and high of all ages kindle themselves. As Dante embodies musically the inner life of the Middle Ages, so Shakespeare embodies for us its outer life, its chivalries, courtesies, humours, ambitions. Dante gave us the soul of Europe; Shakespeare gave us its body. Of this Shakespeare of ours, the best judgment of Europe is slowly pointing to the conclusion that he is the chief of all poets, the greatest intellect who has left record of himself in the way of literature.