Ralph Waldo Emerson | the father of the man in America |
So it fares with the wise Shakspeare and his book of life. He wrote the airs for all our modern music: he wrote the text of modern life; the text of manners: he drew the man of England and Europe; the father of the man in America... the fine demarcations of freedom and of fate: he knew the laws of repression which make the police of nature: and all the sweets and all the terrors of human lot lay in his mind as truly but as softly as the landscape lies on the eye.
—Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Shakspeare; or, The Poet,” Representative Men, 1850
Library of Congress