| Charlecote Church. | Anne Hathaway’s Cottage. | Charlecote Park Palings. |
| Shakespeare’s House Interior. | Shakespeare’s House Exterior. | |
| Entrance to Stratford Church. | Stratford Church. | Porch Charlecote. |
Two hours after leaving Windsor, I find myself in Stratford-on-Avon, the home of our own “priceless Shakespeare.” I spend the night here. “A sweet English village is this Stratford, seated on the edge of a silvery river green with turfy banks and woody slopes, picturesque with cottage houses and cottage gardens; crowned with a village church, ivy-clad, surrounded by moss-grown graves, approached by a lime-tree avenue, and its slender spire tapering towards Heaven.” Here Shakespeare first saw light. Here his boyhood was spent, his education received, his youth passed, his marriage consummated. Here his children were born and brought up. Here, too, he yielded to that “bribeless harvester”—Death. So this humble village has given to the world “the greatest name in our literature, in all literature.” Hence, Henry Bell said:
“His birthplace came to be famous,
And the grave where his bones were laid;
And to Stratford, the ancient borough,
Nations their pilgrimage made.”
Strange thoughts pass through my mind, and deep emotions stir my heart, as I wander through the house wherein was born the man who wrote not for an age, but for all time; as I stand in the church of the Holy Trinity, and look upon the grave, the tomb, and bust of him who analyzed character as chemists analyze material substances. He probed to the heart, and by the light of his own genius read unuttered thoughts and discovered the secret motives of men. Human faces were to him so many books wherein he could “read strange matters.” About a mile from Stratford is the cottage of Anne Hathaway, who first initiated Shakespeare into that sweetest and most delightful of all human mysteries—love.
“That man that hath a tongue, I say, is no man,
If with his tongue he can not win a woman.”
Yes, he won her, and afterwards he could say:
“She is mine own,