Our Old Home. 1863, i. 171.
In Our Old Home (i. 158-60) Hawthorne records his impressions on visiting Shakespeare’s house.
BISHOP CHARLES WORDSWORTH, 1864
(1806-1892)
Take the entire range of English literature; put together our best authors, who have written upon subjects not professedly religious or theological, and we shall not find, I believe, in them all united, so much evidence of the Bible having been read and used, as we have found in Shakespeare alone. This is a phenomenon which admits of being looked at from several points of view; but I shall be content to regard it solely in connection with the undoubted fact, that of all our authors, Shakespeare is also, by general confession, the greatest and the best. According to the testimony of Charles Lamb, a most competent judge in regard to all the literary elements of the question, our poet, “in his divine mind and manners, surpassed not only the great men his contemporaries, but all mankind.” And, looking at this superiority from my own point of view, I cannot but remark that, while most of the great laymen of that great Elizabethan age—Lord Bacon, Sir Walter Raleigh, the poet Spenser, Sir Philip Sidney, Lord Burleigh, Ben Jonson—have paid homage to Christianity, if not always in their practice, yet in the conviction of their understanding, none of them has done this so fully or so effectively as Shakespeare.
“On Shakespeare’s Knowledge and Use of the Bible.” 1864, pp. 291-2.
OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES, 1864
(1809-1894)
O land of Shakespeare! ours with all thy past,
Till these last years that make the sea so wide,