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missing the opportunities provided by Providence than through yielding to the propensities of passion. When the voice of duty is clearly heard, the answer to the call cannot be too prompt, too much consideration only abating the glow of resolution and robbing action of its force. A great poet of our own day has crushed into a stanza the moral of Hamlet :

We cannot kindle when we will

The fire which in the heart resides;

The spirit bloweth and is still,

In mystery our soul abides.

But tasks in hours of insight willed

Can be through hours of gloom fulfilled.

THE MINOR POEMS

AND THE LIFE OF SHAKSPEARE

VENUS AND ADONIS

THE RAPE OF LUCRECE

THE SONNETS

A LOVER'S COMPLAINT

THE PHOENIX AND TURTLE

THRENOS

THE PASSIONATE PILGRIM

CHAPTER VI.

THE MINOR POEMS

AND THE LIFE OF SHAKSPEARE

THERE are many places which attract the tourist through association with the names of famous people but disappoint expectation, because the relics of the past have almost entirely disappeared. This is not the case with Stratford-on-Avon, the birthplace of Shakspeare. As it is approached from Leamington, the station next to it, Wilmcote by name, suggests to the memory Mary Arden, his mother, who was born there. Then, when the visitor descends from the train at Stratford-on-Avon itself, a few minutes take him to the house of the poet's birth; and about the identity there seems to be no doubt.1 A few minutes more will take him to the school in which the boy Shakspeare was educated and which still serves the same purpose for the children of the town. Between these lies the property which he purchased in his manhood, in order to spend in it the evening of life; and, although the building has disappeared, the garden still remains, having been enlarged so as

1 Some think the adjoining house was the birthplace.

to form a public pleasure-ground. At the eastern end of the town, by the bank of the Avon and in the midst of noble trees, stands Trinity Church, in which he lies buried. About a mile from the town is the hamlet of Shottery, in which is preserved the cottage -one of three connected houses running upwards from the road-in which he courted his bride; and not more than three miles away, in another direction, stands the handsome mansion of Charlecote, surrounded by a noble park, associated with an escapade of his youth.

The Stratford-on-Avonians are well aware how valuable an asset is the memory of their fellow-townsman, and they have converted the whole town into a kind of monument to his honour, crowding every place in any way belonging to him with relics and furnishing these with intelligent ciceroni, to explain everything to the curious visitor. The stream of pilgrims flows at the rate of about a hundred a day on an average, although of course it swells in the holiday-months and ebbs in the winter-season. For a parallel to such popularity we must go to the birthplace of Robert Burns at Ayr, to which there flows annually a still larger stream of visitors, or to the scene of Martin Luther's imprisonment at Eisenach, which Carlyle declared to be the most sacred spot he had ever visited on earth, or to the shrine of Saint Francis at Assisi. In Mediæval England the cor

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