Thou soft-?owing Avon, by thy silver stream Of things more than mortal sweet Shakespeare would dream The fairies by moonlight dance round his green bed, For hallowd the turf is which pillowd his head.
GARRICK.
TO a homeless man, who has no spot on this wide world which he truly call his own, there is a momentary feeling of something like independend territorial sequence when, after a weary days travel, he kicks off his boots, thrusts his feet into slippers, and stretches himself before an inn-?re. Let the world without go as it may, let kingdoms rise or fall, so long as he has the wherewithal to pay his bill he is, for the time being, the very monarch of all he surveys. The armchair is his throhe poker his sceptre, and the little parlor, some twelve feet square, his undisputed empire. It is a morsel of certainly snatched from the midst of the uainties of life; it is a sunny moment gleaming out kindly on a cloudy day: and he who has advanced some way on the pilgrimage of existenows the importance of husbanding even morsels and moments of enjoyment.
"Shall I not take mine ease in mine inn?" thought I, as I gave the ?re a stir, lolled ba my elbow-chair, and cast a plat look about the little parlor of the Red Horse at Stratford-on-Avon.
The words of sweet Shakespeare were just passing through my mind as the clock struck midnight from the tower of the chur which he lies buried. There was a geap at the door, and a pretty chambermaid, putting in her smiling face, inquired, with a hesitating air, whether I had rung. I uood it as a modest hint that it was time to retire. My dream of absolute dominion was at an end; so abdig my throne, like a prudent poteo avoid being deposed, and putting the Stratfuide-Book under my arm as a pillow panion, I went to bed, and dreamt all night of Shakespeare, the jubilee, and David Garrick.
The m was one of those quiing ms which we sometimes have in early spring, for it was about the middle of March. The chills of a long winter had suddenly given way; the north wind had spent its last gasp; and a mild air came stealing from the west, breathing the breath of life into Nature, and wooing every bud and ?ower to burst forth intrand beauty.
I had e to Stratford on a poetical pilgrimage. My ?rst visit was to the house where Shakespeare was born, and where, acc to tradition, he was brought up to his fathers craft of wool-bing. It is a small mean-looking edi?ce of wood and plaster, a true ling-place of genius, which seems to delight in hatg its offspring in by-ers. The walls of its squalid chambers are covered with names and inscriptions in every language by pilgrims of all nations, ranks, and ditions, from the prio the peasant, and present a simple but striking instance of the spontaneous and universal homage of mankind to the great poet of Nature.
The house is shown by a garrulous old lady in a frosty red face, lighted up by a cold blue, anxious eye, and garnished with arti?cial locks of ?axen hair curling from under an exceedingly dirty cap. She eculiarly assiduous in exhibiting the relics with which this, like all other celebrated shrines, abounds.
There was the shattered stock of the very matchlock with which Shakespeare shot the deer on his poag exploits. There, too, was his tobacco-box, which proves that he was a rival smoker of Sir Walter Raleigh: the sword also with which he played Hamlet; and the identical lantern with which Friar Laurence discovered Rome