Of thee."
He passed over to England again, to visit a few spots sacred in his imagination which he had not seen in his former journey there. Chief among these were the house and grave of Shakspeare, at Stratford-upon-Avon. With the eagerness and devotion arising from the lifelong enthusiasm of all his professional studies and experience, reinforced by the feeling of the accumulated homage paid at that shrine by mankind at large, he wandered and mused in the places once so familiar with the living presence of the poet, and still seeming to be suffused with his invisible presence. In the day he had made a careful exploration of the church where the unapproachable dramatist lies sepulchred. Late in the evening, when the moon was riding half-way up the heaven, he clambered over the fence, and, while the gentle current of Avon was lapping the sedges on its shore almost at his feet, gazed in at the window and saw the moonbeams silvering the bust of the dead master on the wall, and the carved letters of the quaint and dread inscription on his tomb,—
"Good friend, for Jesus' sake forbear
To dig the dust encloséd here.
Blessed be he who spares these stones,
And cursed be he who moves my bones."
What a contrast the picture of him in this night-scene at the church-window would have made for those familiar with his appearance on the stage in the wrath of Coriolanus, the remorse of Macbeth, the sneer of Richard, the horror of Othello, or the tempest of Lear!
It now lacked but a few days of being two years since Forrest left America, and he began to feel powerfully drawn homewards. It had been a period of unalloyed satisfaction, and he had much improved in many ways, from his intercourse with different forms and classes of society, from his contemplation of natural scenery in many lands, from his study of the masterpieces of art, from his criticism of the performances of the distinguished actors and actresses whom he saw, and from his reading of many valuable books, including, among lighter volumes, such works as those of Locke and Spinoza. In this long tour and deliberate tarry abroad, wisely chosen in his early manhood, before his nature had hardened in routine, with plenty of money, leisure, health, freedom, and aspiration, he had drunk his fill of joy. His brain and spine and ganglia saturated with an amorous drench of elemental force, drunk with every kind of potency, he swayed on his centres in revelling fulness of life. He had been in these two exempted years like Hercules in Olympus, with abundance of ambrosia and nectar and Hebe on his knee. But now his heart cried out for home, and the sense of duty urged him to gird up his loins for work again. Something of his feeling may be guessed from the fact that he had copied into his journal these lines of Byron:
"What singular emotions fill
Their bosoms who have been induced to roam,