the Star of infinite desire.

I think too that as he knelt before an altar, where a thin flame burnt in
a lamp made of green agate, a single vision would have come to him again
and again, a vision of a boat drifting down a broad river between high
hills where there were caves and towers, and following the light of one
Star; and that voices would have told him how there is for every man some
one scene, some one adventure, some one picture that is the image of his
secret life, for wisdom first speaks in images, and that this one image,
if he would but brood over it his life long, would lead his soul,
disentangled from unmeaning circumstance and the ebb and flow of the
world, into that far household, where the undying gods await all whose
souls have become simple as flame, whose bodies have become quiet as an
agate lamp.

But he was born in a day when the old wisdom had vanished and was content
merely to write verses, and often with little thought of more than verses.

1900.

AT STRATFORD-ON-AVON

I

I have been hearing Shakespeare, as the traveller in _News from Nowhere_
might have heard him, had he not been hurried back into our noisy time.
One passes through quiet streets, where gabled and red-tiled houses
remember the Middle Age, to a theatre that has been made not to make
money, but for the pleasure of making it, like the market houses that set
the traveller chuckling; nor does one find it among hurrying cabs and
ringing pavements, but in a green garden by a river side. Inside I have to
be content for a while with a chair, for I am unexpected, and there is not
an empty seat but this; and yet there is no one who has come merely
because one must go somewhere after dinner. All day, too, one does not
hear or see an incongruous or noisy thing, but spends the hours reading
the plays, and the wise and foolish things men have said of them, in the
library of the theatre, with its oak-panelled walls and leaded windows of
tinted glass; or one rows by reedy banks and by old farmhouses, and by old
churches among great trees. It is certainly one's fault if one opens a
newspaper, for Mr. Benson gives one a new play every night, and one need
talk of nothing but the play in the inn-parlour, under the oak beams
blackened by time and showing the mark of the adze that shaped them. I
have seen this week _King John_, _Richard II._, the second part of _Henry
IV._, _Henry V._, the second part of _Henry VI._, and _Richard III._