I did not need to enter into it, for it had already entered into me.

A man of scholarship could have set the period before me in a mass of facts; a man of culture alone could give me power to share, for an evening at least, its spirit and life.
These personal illustrations will be pardoned, because they bring out in the most concrete way that special quality which marks the possession of culture in the deepest sense.

That quality allies it very closely with genius itself, in certain aspects of that rare and inexplicable gift.

For one of the most characteristic qualities of genius is its power of divination, of sharing alien or diverse experiences.

It is this peculiar insight which puts the great dramatists in possession of the secrets of so many temperaments, the springs of so many different personalities, the atmosphere of such remote periods of time,--which, in a way, gives them power to make the dead live again; for Shakespeare can stand at the tomb of Cleopatra and evoke not the shade, but the passionate woman herself out of the dust in which she sleeps.