Of New Place nothing remains but the foundations, swathed in the kindly coverlet of turf, that in England, so soon cloaks deformity with graceful sweeps and swells of verdure. The grounds are tended with pious care, and nobody carps that visitors always loiter here on their way from Shakspeare’s birth-place to his tomb.
We passed to the fane of Holy Trinity between two rows of limes in fullest leaf. The avenue is broad, but the noon beams were severed into finest particles in filtering through the thick green arch; the door closing up the farther end was an arch of grayer glooms. The church-yard is paved with blackened tombstones. The short, rich grass over-spreads mounds and hollows, defines the outlines of the oblong, flat slabs, sprouts in crack and cranny. The peace of the summer heavens rested upon the dear old town—the river slipping silently beneath the bridge in the background—the venerable church, in the vestibule of which we stayed our steps to hearken to music from within. The organist was practising a dreamy voluntary, rising, now, into full chords that left echoes vibrating among the groined arches after he resumed his pensive strain. Walking softly and slowly, lest our tread upon the paved floor might awake dissonant echoes, we gained the chancel. An iron rail hinders the nearer approach to the Grave. This barrier is a recent erection and a work of supererogation, since that sight-seer has not been found so rude as to trample over the sacred dust.
Upon the stone,—even with the rest of the flags—concealing the vault, lay a strip of white cloth, stamped with a fac-simile of the epitaph composed by Shakspeare for his tomb. Volumes have been written to explain its meaning, and treatises to prove that there is nothing recondite in its menace. Since the rail prevented us from getting to that side of the slab next the inner wall of the chancel, we must have read the inscription upside-down but for the convenient copy:
“Good frend for Iesvs sake forbeare,
To digg the dust encloased heare:
Blest be ye man yt spares thes stones,
And cvrst be he yt moves my bones.”
Our eyes returned again and again to the weird lines and the plain stone, as thoughts of what lay beneath it were chased away by the wretched pomp of the monument raised by the nearest relatives of the dead. It is set in the chancel wall about the height of a tall man’s head above the floor and almost directly over the burial-vault. The light from a gorgeous painted window streams upon it. Just beyond, nearer the floor, the effigy of a knight in armor lies upon a recessed sarcophagus. The half-length figure intended for Shakspeare is in an arched niche, the family escutcheon above it. On each side is a naked boy of forbidding countenance. One holds an inverted torch, the other a skull and spade. A second and larger skull surmounts the monument. The marble man—we could not call it Shakspeare—writes, without looking at pen or paper, within an open book, laid upon a cushion. The whole affair, niche, desk, cushion and attitude, reminds one ludicrously of the old-time pulpits likened by Mr. Beecher to a “toddy tumbler with a spoon in it.” The “spoon” in Holy Trinity Church, Stratford, wears the dress of a gentleman of his day, a full, loose surcoat, with falling collar and cuffs. The forehead is high and bald, the face smooth as a pippin, the eyes have a bold, hard stare; upon the mouth, and, indeed, upon all the visage, dwells a smirk, aggressive and ineffable. It is the face of a conceited, pompous, heavy fool, which the fine phrenological development of the cranium cannot redeem. We cannot make it to be to us the man whom, according to the stilted lines below,—
“Envious death has plast
Within this monument.”