" And he goes on:
"Shakespeare is the king of poetic rhythm and style, as well as the king
of the realm of thought: along with his dazzling prose, Shakespeare has
succeeded in giving us the most varied, the most harmonious verse which
has ever sounded upon the human ear since the verse of the Greeks." M.
Henry Cochin,[351] the writer of this sentence, deserves our gratitude
for it; it would not be easy to praise Shakespeare, in a single
sentence, more justly. And when a foreigner and a Frenchman writes thus
of Shakespeare, and when Goethe says of Milton, in whom there was so
much to repel Goethe rather than to attract him, that "nothing has been
ever done so entirely in the sense of the Greeks as _Samson Agonistes_,"
and that "Milton is in very truth a poet whom we must treat with all
reverence," then we understand what constitutes a European recognition
of poets and poetry as contradistinguished from a merely national
recognition, and that in favor both of Milton and of Shakespeare the
judgment of the high court of appeal has finally gone.
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