It is in portrait-painting, the delineation of men, that the greatness of Shakespeare comes out most decisively. His calm, creative perspicacity is unexampled. The word that will describe the thing follows of itself from such clear intense sight of the thing. He takes in all kinds of men--a Falstaff, Othello, Juliet, Coriolanus; sets them all forth to us in their rounded completeness, loving, just, the equal brother of all. The degree of vision that dwells in a man is a correct measure of the man, and Shakespeare's is the greatest of intellects. Novalis beautifully remarks of him that those dramas of his are products of nature, too, deep as nature herself. Shakespeare's art is not artifice; the noblest worth of it is not there by plan or pre-contrivance. The latest generations of men will find new meanings in Shakespeare, new elucidations of their own human being. Shakespeare, too, was a prophet, in his way, of an insight analogous to the prophetic, though he took it up in another strain. Nature seemed to this man also divine, unspeakable, deep as Tophet, high as heaven. "We are such stuff as dreams are made of." There rises a kind of universal psalm out of Shakespeare, not unfit to make itself heard among the still more sacred psalms. England, before long, this island of ours, will hold but a small fraction of the English; east and west to the antipodes there will be a Saxondom covering great spaces of the globe. What is it that can keep all these together into virtually one nation, so that they do not fall out and fight, but live at peace? Here, I say, is an English king whom no time or chance can dethrone! King Shakespeare shines over us all, as the noblest, gentlest, yet strongest of rallying-signs; we can fancy him as radiant aloft over all the nations of Englishmen, a thousand years hence. Truly it is a great thing for a nation that it gets an articulate voice. _IV.--The Hero as Priest_ The priest, too, is a kind of prophet. In him, also, there is required to be a light of inspiration. He presides over the worship of the people, and is the uniter of them with the unseen Holy. He is their spiritual captain, as the prophet is their spiritual king with many captains. Luther and Knox were by express vocation priests, yet it will suit us better here to consider them chiefly in their historical character as reformers. The battling reformer is from time to time a needful and inevitable phenomenon. Obstructions are never wanting; the very things that were once indispensable furtherances become obstructions, and need to be shaken off and left behind us--a business often of enormous difficulty.