must have widened beyond any possible comprehension of hers, nor can his two daughters, unlettered and out of his world as they were, have had much inkling of the career and achievements of "so rare a wonder'd father." His parents were dead. Their ashes may now mingle with little Hamnet's in some forgotten plot of the elm-shadowed churchyard. Of his two daughters, Susanna, the elder, had married a Stratford physician, and there was a grandchild, little Elizabeth Hall, to brighten the gardens of New Place. As I lingered there,—for the gardens remain, though the house is gone,—my eyes rested on a three-year-old lass in a fluttering white frock,—no wraith, though she might have been,—dancing among the flowers with such uncertain steps and tossing such tiny hands in air that the birds did not trouble themselves to take to their wings, but hopped on before her like playfellows.
The deepest of the Shakespeare mysteries is, to my mind, the silence of those closing years. Were nerves and brain temporarily exhausted from the strain of that long period of continuous production? Or had he come home from London sore at heart, "toss'd from wrong to injury," smarting from "the whips and scorns of time" and abjuring the "rough magic" of his art? Or was he, in "the sessions of sweet silent thought," dreaming on some high, consummate poem in comparison with which the poor stage-smirched plays seemed to him not worth the gathering up? Or might he, taking a leaf out of Ben Jonson's book, have been in fact arranging and rewriting his works, purging his gold from the dross of various collaborators? Or was some new, inmost revelation of life dawning upon him, holding him dumb with awe? We can only ask, not answer; but certainly they err who claim that the divinest genius of English letters had wrought merely for house and land, and found his chief reward in writing "Gentleman" after his name.
"Sure, he that made us with such large discourse
Looking before and after, gave us not
That capability and godlike reason
To rust in us unus'd."
Shakespeare had been gentle before he was a gentleman, and had held ever—let his own words bear witness!—
"Virtue and cunning were endowments greater
Than nobleness and riches."
The gods had given him but fifty-two years on earth—had they granted more, he might have probed and uttered too many of their secrets—when for the last time he was "with holy bell ... knoll'd to church." It was an April day when the neighbours bore a hand-bier—as I saw a hand-bier borne a few years since across the fields from Shottery—the little way from New Place down Chapel Lane and along the Waterside—or perhaps by Church Street—and up the avenue, beneath its blossoming limes, to Holy Trinity.
Here, where the thousands and the millions come up to do reverence to this
"Dear Son of Memory, great Heir of Fame,"
I passed a peaceful hour, ruffled only—if the truth must out—by the unjustifiable wrath which ever rises in me on reading Mrs. Susanna Hall's epitaph. I can forgive the "tombemaker" who wrought the bust, I can endure the stained-glass windows, I can overlook the alabaster effigy of John Combe in Shakespeare's chancel, but I resent the Puritan self-righteousness of the lines,—
"Witty above her sexe, but that's not all,
Wise to salvation was good Mistris Hall,
Something of Shakespeare was in that but this
Wholly of him with whom she's now in blisse."