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So powerful, indeed, is the unifying effect of this interchange of thought that to-day the mental life of all countries sharing European literature may be compared to one body of water in a great inland sea; divided indeed into bays, gulfs and inlets, but permeated everywhere by the same currents and forming one common mass. The three large and almost international forms of speech, English, French and German, may well be compared to main currents, a particle committed to whose waves is instantly swept abroad everywhere; yet the smallest form of literary speech, such as the Dutch or Portuguese, does not shut out the people using it from the common interchange. Like little bays, divided from the main body by a low sand-bar, before which the waves of the outer currents may be delayed for a moment, but which they are sure to overleap sooner or later, bearing in all that the outer mass contains, and sweeping out to join the larger body all the deposits peculiar to the smaller, so into the smallest literary speech is sure to be borne, sooner or later, by means of translation, all of value that deposits itself in the larger life and literature of Europe, and all they have to contribute is borne out into the larger. The moralizings of a Russian reformer and the visions of the Norwegian playwright, for a moment confined within the limits of their narrower national tongues, are yet swept into the world-wide speeches and span the globe, adding an integral portion to "the spirit of the age," as certainly as though first couched in a world-wide tongue.