Sitting on the shelf beneath The House with the Seven Gables is the king of all the magicians—the enchanter’s name printed in tarnished gold letters on a faded square of scarlet morocco on its calf back—‘Shakspeare.’
On this hot July forenoon, with dusty smelling streets, when the united heart of our mighty Babylon is panting for the water-brooks, wouldn’t it be a treat just to step into the forest of Arden? You don’t require to change your clothes, or bolt a hurried luncheon, or run to catch a train, or take your place on the crowded deck of a snorting greasy steamboat under a vertical sun; but simply to open out the volume at that most delightful of all comedies, As You Like It, and at once fling yourself down ‘under the shade of melancholy boughs,’ and ‘lose and neglect the creeping hours of time’ listening to the moralising of a Jaques
As he lay along
Under an oak, whose antique root peeps out
Upon the brook that brawls along this wood:
or to an encounter of his wits with the sage fooleries of a Touchstone; or the love-sick ravings of an Orlando; or the nimble pleasantries and caustic humours of a Rosalind.
But, to speak the truth, I don’t know whether I should not prefer at this moment—to a lounge in the forest of Arden—a meditative ramble and chat with the Wanderer in Wordsworth’s Excursion, which I spy leaning against my old friend The Vicar of Wakefield, there, on the other side of Shakspeare. How pleasant it would be, after toiling across the bare wide common, baked with the scorching heat, to join that venerable philosopher and retired packman just where the author himself meets him by appointment, reposing his limbs on the cottage bench beside the roofless hut of poor Margaret!
His eyes as if in drowsiness half shut,
The shadow of the breezy elms above
Dappling his face.