Chapter Second. IN THE WOODS. Love thyself last: cherish those hearts that hate thee; Still in thy right hand carry gentle peace To silence envious tongues. Be just and fear not. Thy God's, and truth's.-King Henry the Eighth, iii., 2. IKE every true lover of nature, Shakspere is always at home in the Woods :-of these, as an artist, he never tires; in the woods, as a skilful dramatist, he lays some of his most admired and poetic scenes. Shakspere's acquaintance with sylvan scenery was certainly much more intimate than with mountains, waterfalls, and other grand elements of inanimate nature. There is no reason to believe that he ever visited North Wales or the Lake District; and the seashore must of necessity have been unfamiliar, though he knew enough of it to give us the immortal picture in King Lear : The murmuring surge, That on the unnumber'd idle pebbles chafes, that other, in 2nd King Henry the Fourth, Yea, this man's brow, like to a title-leaf Betrays the nature of a tragic volume : So looks the strand whereon the imperious flood and that lovely one in the Tempest, where with himself we see the little children giving the wave their oldaccustomed summer challenge;— Ye elves of hills, brooks, standing lakes, and groves; Do chase the ebbing Neptune, and do fly him, Spending his youth in the ancient and glorious forestshades of Warwickshire, and returning to them after his London life, no wonder that trees hold a place so distinguished in his imagery. It was under the boughs of immemorial forest-monarchs that his imagination found earliest nurture; and no pleasure that we can conceive of as concurrent with his declining years can have exceeded the calm delight with which he trod the shaded pathways wherein he had gathered his first impressions of the beauty of nature, and tasted the deep joy of meditation. Not only were grand old trees a daily spectacle during his boyhood: he was much alone with them, as with most other elements of wild nature, and thus peculiarly open to their influence. It is fortunate for us that he was so circumstanced. Mr. Ruskin somewhere remarks that the quietude of Shakspere's early intercourse with nature contributed in no slight measure to the perfection of mental power disclosed so marvellously at a riper age, and which the word "Shaksperean" is sufficient to denote. His walks were in scented meadows, where he would hear no voices but those of the birds, and by the smooth and lilied river, from which he would change to the green recesses of the forest. No other scenes were at his command, save in the village, and even here the prevailing condition would be one of tranquillity. But we must not think of Shakspere's forests from the woodlands of to-day. Except in Sherwood, and the older parts of William Rufus' famous plantation, we have little of the kind which in the Elizabethan times still existed in plenty. Wheat now grows upon many a broad acre which, when Shakspere wrote, was covered with timber, and not simply timber such as pleases a modern dealer, but magnificent and aboriginal forest, the like of which in England can never be seen again. Many of the trees now so common in England that they seem indigenous, the birch for example, and the Lombardy poplar, had not been introduced; and even the sycamore and the Norway spruce were known only in private pleasure-grounds. Shakspere's forest consisted of trees such as had given shelter to Caractacus, and the great mass of them would be majestic. Those which now occupy the place of the C aged Titans of the olden time, are in comparison small and juvenile. We may learn what the former were from the huge slices preserved in the best of the old Elizabethan mansions, Haddon Hall for instance. Happily, too, a few survive to tell their own story, dotted over the country, as the Cowthorpe oak, the Marton oak, Sir Philip Sidney's, and others of the well-named "memorial trees" of our island. Trees such as these must be thought of when we would understand in what kind of school Shakspere learned his forest-lessons. They were not received from saplings of only a century or two of birthdays, but from patriarchs. Of the many beautiful scenes laid by Shakspere in the quiet of great woods and forests, the most charming are those in the Midsummer Night's Dream, and in As You Like It, that delicious pastoral, in which it has been said so truly, "he teaches us how to forget the painful lessons of life, in the contemplation of faithfulness, generosity, and affection." The chief part of the action in each of these matchless pieces lies amid trees; and it is worth noting that it is in these two that Shakspere most wins upon the heart that delights in peace. Nowhere are we nourished more exquisitely by his humane and dulcet wisdom than when listening to him among the trees which bore "love songs on their barks" :— Now, my co-mates and brothers in exile, Hath not old custom made this life more sweet The seasons' difference; as the icy fang, And churlish chiding of the winter's wind, Which, when it bites and blows upon upon my body, This is no flattery; these are counsellors That feelingly persuade me what I am. Which, like the toad, ugly and venomous, Wears yet a precious jewel in his head. And this our life, exempt from public haunt, Finds tongues in trees, books in the running brooks, Nowhere, either, are we touched more tenderly with thought of what is gracious and chivalric than when with Helena in "another part of the wood"—not now Arden, but that lovely one "near Athens." If you were civil, and knew courtesy, A trim exploit, a manly enterprise, To conjure tears up in a poor maid's eyes! Midsummer Night's Dream, iii., 2. Nature, says a great essayist, is "coloured by the spirit." Hence, in the former play, to Orlando, who carries sorrowful thoughts with him, all for a time is rude, waste, and disheartening: Speak you so gently? Pardon me, I pray you, I thought that all things had been savage here, Of stern commandment. But whate'er you are, |