So few men in any age are born with a marked gift for literary
expression, so few of this number have access to high culture, so few
even of these have the personal nobleness to use their powers well,
and this small band is finally so decimated by disease and manifold
disaster, that it makes one shudder to observe how little of the
embodied intellect of any age is left behind. Literature is attar of
roses, one distilled drop from a million blossoms. Think how Spain and
Portugal once divided the globe between them in a treaty, when England
was a petty kingdom of illiterate tribes!--and now all Spain is
condensed for us into Cervantes, and all Portugal into the fading fame
of the unread Camoens. The long magnificence of Italian culture has
left us only _I Quattro Poeti_, the Four Poets. The difference between
Shakspeare and his contemporaries is not that he is read twice, ten
times, a hundred times as much as they: it is an absolute difference; he
is read, and they are only printed.

Yet, if our life be immortal, this temporary distinction is of little
moment, and we may learn humility, without learning despair, from
earth's evanescent glories. Who cannot bear a few disappointments, if
the vista be so wide that the mute inglorious Miltons of this sphere
may in some other sing their Paradise as Found? War or peace, fame or
forgetfulness, can bring no real injury to one who has formed the fixed
purpose to live nobly day by day. I fancy that in some other realm of
existence we may look back with some kind interest on this scene of our
earlier life, and say to one another,--"Do you remember yonder planet,
where once we went to school?" And whether our elective study here lay
chiefly in the fields of action or of thought will matter little to us
then, when other schools shall have led us through other disciplines.