In conclusion, the thought rises of itself, will this continuity, assimilative power, and copiousness, this original genius, this serviceableness to civilization and the private life, this supreme romantic art, be maintained, now that the English and their speech are spread through the world, or is the history of the intellectual expansion of Athens and Rome, the moral expansion of Jerusalem, to be repeated? The saying of Shelley, "The mind in creation is a fading coal," seems to be true of nations. Great literatures, or periods in them, have usually marked the culmination of national power; and if they "look before and after," as Virgil in the Æneid, they gather their wisdom, as he too did, by a gaze reverted to the past. The paradox of progress, in that the laudator temporis acti is always found among the best and noblest of the elders, while yet the whole world of man ever moves on to greater knowledge, power and good, continues like the riddle of the Sphinx; but time seems unalterably in favor of mankind through all dark prophecies. The mystery of genius is unsolved; and the Messianic hope that a child may be born unto the people always remains; but the greatness of a nation dies only with that genius which is not a form of human greatness in individuals, but is shared by all of the blood, and constitutes them fellow-countrymen. The genius of the English shows no sign of decay; age has followed age, each more gloriously, and whether the period that is now closing be really an end or only the initial movement of a vaster arc of time, corresponding to the greater English destiny, world-wide, world-peopling, world-freeing, the arc of the movement of democracy through the next ages,—is immaterial; so long as the genius of the people, its piety and daring, its finding faculty for truth, its creative shaping in art, be still integral and vital, so long as its spiritual passion be fed from those human and divine ideas whose abundance is not lessened, and on those heroic tasks which a world still half discovered and partially subdued opens through the whole range of action and of the intellectual and moral life,—so long as these things endure, English speech must still be fruitful in great ages of literature, as in the past these have been its fountainheads. But if no more were to be written on the page of English, yet what is written there, contained and handed down in famous books and made the spiritual food of the vast multitude whose children's children shall use and read the English tongue through coming centuries under every sky, will constitute a moral dominion to which Virgil's line may proudly apply—
His ego nec metas rerum nec tempora pono:
Imperium sine fine dedi.
One Hundred Books
Famous in English Literature
Dan Chaucer, the first warbler, whose sweet breath
Preluded those melodious bursts that fill
The spacious times of great Elizabeth
With sounds that echo still.
Tennyson