In that case a "Twelfth Night," or
an "Othello," might have come from Luther. Nature does not work so
loosely. Rich is she, unspeakably rich, and as artful as she is
profuse in the use of her riches. She delights in variety, thence her
ineffable radiance, and much of her immeasurable efficiency.
Diverseness in unity is a source of her power as well as of her
beauty. Her wealth of material being infinite, her specifications are
endless, countless, superfinely minute. Even no two of the commonest
men does she make alike; her men of genius she diversifies at once
grandly and delicately, broadly and subtly. "Petrarch and Boccaccio
did diplomatic messages," says Mr. Carlyle. We hope they did,
or could have done, in the prosaic field, much better than that. We
Americans know with what moderate equipment diplomatic messages may be
done.
On poetry and poets Mr. Carlyle has written many of his best pages,
pages penetrating, discriminative, because so sympathetic, and
executed with the scholar's care and the critic's culture. His early
papers on Goethe and Burns, published more than forty years ago, made
something like an epoch in English criticism.
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