His feeling for Nature
It will be remembered, also, how touchingly the same comparison appears in the scene wherein Cordelia and Lear are led off the stage guarded. When she asks her father, “Shall we not see these daughters and these sisters?” Lear impatiently answers,
No, no, no, no. Come, let’s away to prison:
We two alone will sing like birds i’ the cage;
When thou dost ask me the blessing, I’ll kneel down
And ask of thee forgiveness: so we’ll live,
And pray, and sing, and tell old tales, and laugh
At gilded butterflies, …
And take upon’s the mystery of things.[17]
Shakespeare’s feeling for Nature and love of outdoor life are nowhere more fully and admirably expressed than in his delightful Play of As You Like It. Pervaded by the very breath of the country and the charms of rural life and sylvan peace, the chief scenes of this drama are laid in a landscape that was doubtless based on recollections of his youthful home, and he appropriately named it after his own “Forest of Arden” in Warwickshire. He transports us to a green woodland, interspersed with copses of hawthorns and brambles, revealing grassy glades among venerable trees, where flocks of sheep and goats are pasturing, while here and there we catch sight of a quiet herd of deer. We meet, too, with shepherds and foresters, and come upon a cottage near the rank osiers by a murmuring stream. Now and then our attention is drawn to some specially picturesque feature in the timber of the forest, such as “an oak whose antique root peeps out upon the brook that brawls along the wood.”[18] Or we are halted