e
is the altar, and there the open prayer-book,--you can almost read the
service from it. Of the many striking things that Henry Ward Beecher
has said, nothing, perhaps, is more impressive than his account of his
partaking of the communion at that altar in the church where Shakspeare
rests. A memory more divine than his overshadowed the place, and he
thought of Shakspeare, "as he thought of ten thousand things, without
the least disturbance of his devotion," though he was kneeling directly
over the poet's dust.

If you will stroll over to Shottery now with me, we can see the Ann
Hathaway cottage from four different points, which will leave nothing
outside of it to be seen. Better to look at than to live in. A fearful
old place, full of small vertebrates that squeak and smaller articulates
that bite, if its outward promise can be trusted. A thick thatch covers
it like a coarse-haired hide. It is patched together with bricks and
timber, and partly crusted with scaling plaster. One window has the
diamond panes framed in lead, such as we remember seeing of old in one
or two ancient dwellings in the town of Cambridge, hard by. In this view
a young man is sitting, pensive, on the steps which Master William, too
ardent lover, used to climb with hot haste and descend with lingering
delay. Young men die, but youth lives. Life goes on in the cottage just
as it used to three hundred years ago. On the rail before the door sits
the puss of the household, of the fiftieth generation, perhaps, from
that "harmless, necessary cat" which purred round the poet's legs as he
sat talking love with Ann Hathaway. At the foot of the steps is a huge
basin, and over the rail hangs--a dishcloth, drying. In these homely
accidents of the very instant, that cut across our romantic ideals with
the sharp edge of reality, lies one of the ineffable charms of the
sun-picture. It is a little thing that gives life to a scene or a face;
portraits are never absolutely alive, because they do not _wink_.

Come, we are full of Shakspeare; let us go up among the hills and see
where another poet lived and lies. Here is Rydal Mount, the home of
Wordsworth. Two-storied, ivy-clad, hedge-girdled, dropped into a crease
among the hills that look down dimly from above, as if they were hunting
after it as ancient dames hunt after a dropped thimble. In these walks
he used to go "booing about," as his rustic neighbor had it,--reciting
his own verses. Here is his grave in Gr