The Thames and Eton from the Terrace, Windsor Castle

128

SHAKESPEARE

It seems to be with Shakespeare as it is with Nature. As she fashions in her impartial thoroughness of workmanship, or reveals herself in her infinity of phases, so he depicts. Like hers his touch is as precise and finished in minutiæ as in what is most eminent and impressive. Responsive and faithful to her in her most appalling and terrific manifestations, as in the thunderstorm in Lear and the tempest at sea in Pericles, in her scenes of awe-compelling grandeur as in his picture of Dover Cliff, in her phenomena of mingled grandeur and loveliness, her dawning and setting suns, her rivers, her seas, her landscapes, he is equally faithful to her in his representations of her minutest and most insignificant creations. In a truth very literal it may be said of Shakespeare as it was said of Wordsworth's Wanderer

Early had he learned

To reverence the volume that displays
The mystery, the life which cannot die.

There did he see the writing;—all things there
Breathed immortality, revolving life

And greatness still revolving; infinite:

In many a calmer hour of sober thought
To look on Nature with a humble heart,
Self-questioned where it did not understand,
And with a superstitious eye of love.

And that is the more remarkable, this minute care with which Shakespeare studied natural phenomena, when we remember that his work as a poet was in no way immediately concerned with them; at most they could but furnish him with ornament, with what was essentially subordinate and collateral in his themes and in his aims. And now for a few illustrations which it will be seen not only indicate the keen interest with which they must have been regarded, as proved by the impression made on memory, but the close scrutiny to which most of them must have been submitted:

Cinque-spotted, like the crimson drops

I' the bottom of a cowslip.

Cymbeline, II. ii.

"Furr'd moss" (Cymbeline, Iv. ii.), "Blue-veined violets (Venus and Adonis, 125), “Cuckoo buds of yellow hue” (Love's Labour's Lost, v. ii.), "the ripest mulberry that will not hold the handling" (Coriolanus, III. ii.), the "willow that shows his hoar leaves in the glassy stream" (Hamlet, IV. vii.), "the ousel-cock with orange-tawny bill" (Midsummer Night's Dream, III. i.), “the russet-pated chough" (Midsummer Night's

SHAKESPEARE'S BIRTHPLACE

Behind Shakespeare's birthplace at Stratford-on-Avon lies the garden in which some fifty or sixty years ago were planted the trees, flowers, and shrubs mentioned in his plays. They have now grown into quite a picturesque old English garden.