ABSTRACT
This chapter presents an extract from an article published in Prose Writings of William Cullen Bryant Ed. Parke Godwin. 2 vols. New York, 1964. Both of these speeches were made at the annual dinner of the St. George’s Society in 1870 and 1871. Shakespeare, though he cannot be called an American poet, as he was not born here and never saw our continent, is yet a poet of the Americans. The blood that now warms American hearts and gushes through American arteries was once—nearly three hundred years ago, when it ran in the veins of our ancestors in the Old World, and while Shakespeare was yet alive—made to tingle by his potent words. The poet was eminent beyond all other poets, and not likely to be surpassed while the human race retains its present rank on the earth, and man is still what another poet has called him—"Lord of the fowl and the brute.”.
