ing and cawing at the gun's report
Sever themselves and madly sweep the sky,
So at his sight away his fellows fly.
(_Midsummer Night's Dream._)

And plant life is touched with special tenderness:

All the bystanders had wet their cheeks
Like trees bedashed with rain.
(_Richard III._)

Why grow the branches when the root is gone?
Why wither not the leaves that want their sap?
(_Richard III._)

Their lips were four red roses on a stalk,
Which in their summer beauty kiss'd each other.
(_Richard III._)

Ah! my tender babes!
My unblown flowers, new appearing sweets.
(_Richard III._)

Romeo is

To himself so secret and so close ...
As is the bud bit with an envious worm,
Ere he can spread his sweet leaves to the air
Or dedicate his beauty to the sun.

It is astonishing to see how Shakespeare noted the smallest and most
fragile things, and found the most poetic expression for them without
any sacrifice of truth to Nature.

Juliet is 'the sweetest flower of all the field.' Laertes says to
Ophelia:

For Hamlet and the trifling of his favour
Hold it a fashion and a toy in blood,
A violet in the youth of primy nature,
Forward not permanent, sweet not lasting,
The perfume and suppliance of a moment.
The canker galls the infants of the spring
Too oft before their buttons be disclosed;
And in the morn and liquid dew of youth
Contagious blastments are most imminent.
(_Hamlet._)

Hamlet soliloquizes:

How weary, stale, flat, and unprofitable
Seems to me all the uses of this world.
Fie on't, O fie! 'tis an unweeded garden
That grows to seed; things rank and gross in nature
Possess it merely.

Indeed, it goes so heavily with my disposition that this goodly
frame the earth seems to me a sterile promontory, this most
excellent canopy the air, look you--this brave o'erhanging
firmament, this majestical roof fretted with golden fire, why, it
appears no other thing to me but a foul and pestilent
congregation of vapours.

But the great advance which he made is seen far more in the
sympathetic way in which he drew Nature into the action of the play.

He established perfect harmony between human fate and the natural
phenomena around it.