use many are dropped. Of these no small number fall on
waste ground; a few take root, only to be overgrown or destroyed before
they reach the beginnings of strength. But here and there an acorn drops
on favourable soil; the rich earth nourishes it; the germ, when it has
lived on all the store within the shell, can gather its future needs
from the ground. Little roots and fibres pierce the soil; a green twig
rises to seek the sun; there are long years of silent precarious growth,
and then the sapling stage is passed and a young tree sends countless
leaves to draw nourishment from air and sky. Following this comes the
time when no storm can uproot the tree that a hungry rabbit might have
destroyed in days past--something has come to complete maturity and has
developed all the possibilities that were equally latent in so many
million acorns to which growth was denied. As it is with plants, so it
is with men, and thus it becomes permissible to compare literature with
a forest wherein are so many trees, so many saplings, and so much dense
undergrowth, from which trees of worth and beauty may one day spring. In
our national forest there is an oak that first saw life in the year
1564. There are many older trees of splendid worth, but this is the one
which stands alone. What manner of soil nourished it? Whence came its
strength? This little work is a brief attempt to set the well-known
answer down again in a form that may offer a certain convenience in
point of size and selection to lovers of a great poet.

When we read Shakespeare's plays for the first time, it is at once
apparent that the poet was a countryman. He has the knowledge, founded
upon close observation, that we associate with the highly intelligent
dweller in the countryside, the man or woman from whom the poet differs
merely in his supreme capacity for expression. We turn again to his
scenes of city life to find he is no less at home there. It is quite
another world, but he has fathomed it; quite another company of men, but
he has gauged their strength and weakness, the pathos and humour of
their lives. He deals with rulers and courts, and his touch is as sure
and faithful as before; his genius has taught him that kings and queens
are men and women like the rest of us, that environment cannot alter
fundamental characteristics, that royalty is swayed by the same forces
that rule the lives of lesser men.

Only when he deals with foreigners the poet of Avon is often