"Weaving her threads with bones,"
lace-making; and as she works, she chants some old ditty,—some song, "that dallies with the innocence of love, like the old age."
"Come away, come away, death,
And in sad cypress let me be laid;
Fly away, fly away, breath,
I am slain by a fair cruel maid:
My shroud of white, stuck all with yew,
O, prepare it—
My part of death no one so true
Did share it.
Not a flower, not a flower, sweet,
On my black coffin let there be strewn;
Not a friend, not a friend, greet
My poor corpse, where my bones shall be thrown;
A thousand, thousand sighs to save,
Lay me, O where
Sad true lover ne'er find my grave,
To weep there."[1]
And whilst she sings, the youth, her son, seated upon a stool at her feet, is deeply engaged in perusing the goodly-sized volume he holds upon his knees.
Such is the picture. The sun streams through the diamond panes of that ample window, and gives a glowing tint to the red curtains of the old square-topped bedstead, and other cumbrous articles of furniture; the high-backed chairs, and the heavy oaken table in the background. What would the illustrious of the world,—what would the most honoured in the world's esteem, of our own day, for arts, for arms, or for learning,—what would they give for one glance into "the dark backward and abysm of time,"—but one glance, so to see that mother and her son;—that mother who implanted grace in her child; that child whose high spirit had been tamed and cultivated by her influence? And what, indeed, should we all be, saith a great writer, but for the influence of women in our youth?
They give us life, and they also give us the life of the soul. How many things do we learn of them as sons, lovers, or friends?
The youthful Shakespeare loved to hold sweet converse with his handsome mother, and whom he loved so well. From her conversation, in his boyhood he had taken his first impressions of things: from her legendary stories, (so sweetly related,) he had gathered many facts of history. In winter's tedious nights, how oft had she pictured to him all she had heard from her own parents, of the York and Lancastrian wars, and the horrors to which England had been reduced—"Discord in every state, discord in every family!" From her's, and from his father's relations, over the winter's fire, were gathered the boy's first impressions of those fierce English, whose characteristics (according to their foes) were force of pride, and obstinacy—those doggedly resolute, those invincibly cool islanders, who, in all their splendour of their feudal pride, had so often walked through the vasty fields of France, as if in some harnessed masque, eating up the lands on all sides, and still fighting onwards in their own joyless way: burning, slaying, and destroying for so many centuries, till they made captive at Agincourt, not only of the French king, but the very realm.
'Twas thus the boy had learnt his first lesson in the history of his country, not either exactly as a lesson, but in the homely popular form of a winter night's tale, as the simple story, or faith of a mother.
And what we thus inbibe with the milk we suck, and with our growing blood, is a living thing as it were, and what the boy loved to listen to as a simple story, the youth loved to follow out as a study. He reads of the events his mother has told him of, and given him a taste for, in the chronicled history of the wars of the time; whilst the little of life and splendour he has already seen, in the brilliant era in which he lives, has given him, even now, an impression of the pride, pomp, and circumstance of the Norman period.