Bleste be ye man yt spares thes stones,
And cursed be he yt moves my bones.”
I had a immense emotions of or as I read these words, and dassent hardly lay my hand on’t. But made up my mind that as I didn’t have no idee of movin’ his bones, and laid out to spare the stuns, I might venter.
There are them that think that some great secret wuz buried with Shakespeare—them are the ones that are so sot on thinkin’ that Bacon wuz the one who writ the great plays, and they say in this very inscription is hid in cypher a confession that Bacon writ ’em.
But I didn’t seem to think so, nor Josiah didn’t, though he wuz all took up with the idee of the cypher, as Martin broached it.
Sez he, “How beautiful it would be, and how stylish, to write to you when you’re off on your towers with a cypher! I could write it in poetry, and it would be so uneek, and if I wanted to complain to you about the children, or Ury, or anything, how handy it would be!”
“But,” I sez, “in answer to that idee of yourn, I can quote to you the first line of Shakespeare’s epitaph, and I feel it, too,” sez I.
He went back and read it over agin, and come back lookin’ real puggicky.
But I see that other folks had felt jest as I did about disturbin’ the slab, for it looked fresh and new, while the other ones near it wuz all worn with the footprints of time and the tourists; and when the poet’s wife and daughter died, they wanted dretful to be laid by William, but they dassent open the grave. The curse he threatened held ’em back.
Queer! I wish I knew what he meant by it, but can’t; the silence of three hundred years can’t be broke by one small woman’s voice, or ruther one woman’s small voice. No answer comes to our deep wonder and curosity.