Page:Studies in Letters and Life (Woodberry, 1890).djvu/130

120 seem as if the laws of spiritual development were unperceived; as if the knowledge of right and wrong as indestructible agencies to build or shatter character did not exist; as if the spirit had stiffened into that senseless stupor in which evil is no longer recognized for itself. It was left for the dramatists of the Globe Theatre to take these external incidents and show the meaning they had for humanity; to transfer the interest from the momentary and outer act, and centre it upon the living soul within. The Italians could not work the mines they owned; the pure gold of poetry that the novels held in amalgamation was to be the treasure of England. The works of the last years do not differ from the original of Boccaccio except for the worse; his successors never equaled their master; nor have their works obtained currency, like his, among men, as a part of the general literature of the cultivated world.

As the novelists make more prominent the realistic element of the narrative poems, the idyllic writers develop more plainly the pure poetic quality; in reading them one willingly assents to the enthusiasm which names their works the literature of the