Dante, Shakespeare, Milton - From

Doctor.        Ah! thou, too,  
Sad Alighieri, like a waning moon  
Setting in storm behind a grove of bays!  
 Balder.  Yes, the great Florentine, who wove his web  
And thrust it into hell, and drew it forth
Immortal, having burn’d all that could burn,  
And leaving only what shall still be found  
Untouch’d, nor with the small of fire upon it,  
Under the final ashes of this world.  
 Doctor.  Shakespeare and Milton!
 Balder.        Switzerland and home.  
I ne’er see Milton, but I see the Alps,  
As once, sole standing on a peak supreme,  
To the extremest verge summit and gulf  
I saw, height after depth, Alp beyond Alp,
O’er which the rising and the sinking soul  
Sails into distance, heaving as a ship  
O’er a great sea that sets to strands unseen.  
And as the mounting and descending bark,  
Borne on exulting by the under deep,
Gains of the wild wave something not the wave,  
Catches a joy of going, and a will  
Resistless, and upon the last lee foam  
Leaps into air beyond it, so the soul  
upon the Alpine ocean mountain-toss’d,
Incessant carried up to heaven, and plunged  
To darkness, and still wet with drops of death  
Held into light eternal, and again  
Cast down, to be again uplift in vast  
And infinite succession, cannot stay
The mad momentum, but in frenzied sight  
Of horizontal clouds and mists and skies  
And the untried Inane, springs on the surge  
Of things, and passing matter by a force  
Material, thro’ vacuity careers,
Rising and falling.  
 Doctor.        And my Shakespeare! Call  
Milton your Alps, and which is he among  
The tops of Andes? Keep your Paradise,  
And Eves, and Adams, but give me the Earth
That Shakespeare drew, and make it grave and gay  
With Shakespeare’s men and women; let me laugh  
Or weep with them, and you—a wager,—aye,  
A wager by my faith—either his muse  
Was the recording angel, or that hand
Cherubic, which fills up the Book of Life,  
Caught what the last relaxing gripe let fall  
By a death-bed at Stratford, and hence-forth  
Holds Shakespeare’s pen. Now strain your sinews, poet,  
And top your Pelion,—Milton Switzerland,
And English Shakespeare—  
 Balder.        This dear English land!  
This happy England, loud with brooks and birds,  
Shining with harvests, cool with dewy trees,  
And bloom’d from hill to dell; but whose best flowers
Are daughters, and Ophelia still more fair  
Than any rose she weaves; whose noblest floods  
The pulsing torrent of a nation’s heart:  
Whose forests stronger than her native oaks  
Are living men; and whose unfathom’d lakes
Forever calm the unforgotten dead  
In quiet graveyards willow’d seemly round,  
O’er which To-day bends sad, and sees his face.  
Whose rocks are rights, consolidate of old  
Thro’ unremember’d years, around whose base
The ever-surging peoples roll and roar  
Perpetual, as around her cliffs the seas  
That only wash them whiter; and whose mountains,  
Souls that from this mere footing of the earth  
Lift their great virtues thro’ all clouds of Fate
Up to the very heavens, and make them rise  
To keep the gods above us!