Page:Appreciations of Horace Howard Furness.djvu/17

 through his father, William Henry Furness, for fifty years head of the Unitarian Church founded by Joseph Priestley, a more intimate contact with the romantic movement in England than fell to other young Americans of the period. It was in Philadelphia that Wordsworth was first appreciated at his full value by an American. It was there that Coleridge was first printed. There, in a commonwealth for two centuries nearer Germany than any other American state, German translation began. William Henry Furness early addressed himself to this field. His daughter, Mrs. Annis Lee Wister, continued the task through thirty years, her last work appearing in a volume of her brother's Variorum series. Where other commentators in our tongue, in either home of our race, have looked to English comment, Dr. Furness from the first significant dedication of his Hamlet (1877), written in personal exultation over German triumph as proving Germany no longer the 'Hamlet of Nations,' has seen Shakspere as a world poet, has come close to German authority and research, and equaled its thorough and exact character without falling into its pedantry or its far-fetched gloss.

From many causes he knew all it is to be a gentleman, and when every year he rose as dean of the Shakspere Society on St. George's day to give the solitary toast, 'William Shakspere, gentleman,' it was on the last word that his