Many faces of actors appear upon those walls—from Garrick to Edmund Kean, from Macready to Henry Irving, from Kemble to Edwin Booth, from Mrs. Siddons to Ellen Terry, Ada Rehan, and Mary Anderson. Prominent among the pictures is a spirited portrait of Garrick and his wife, playing at cards, wherein the lovely, laughing lady archly discloses that her hands are full of hearts. Not otherwise, truly, is it with sweet and gentle Stratford herself, where peace and beauty and the most hallowed and hallowing of poetic associations garner up, forever and forever, the hearts of all mankind.
In previous papers upon this subject I have tried to express the feelings that are excited by personal contact with the relics of Shakespeare—the objects that he saw and the fields through which he wandered. Fancy would never tire of lingering in this delicious region of flowers and of dreams. From the hideous vileness of the social condition of London in the time of James the First, Shakespeare must indeed have rejoiced to depart into this blooming garden of rustic tranquillity. Here also he could find the surroundings that were needful to sustain him amid the vast and overwhelming labours of his final period. No man, however great his powers, can ever, in this world, escape from the trammels under which nature enjoins and permits the exercise of the brain. Ease, in the intellectual life, is always visionary. The higher a man's faculties the higher are his ideals,—toward which, under the operation of a divine law, he must perpetually strive, but to the height of which he will never absolutely attain. So, inevitably, it was with Shakespeare.
But, although genius cannot escape from itself and is no more free than the humblest toiler in the vast scheme of creation, it may—and it must—sometimes escape from the world: and this wise poet, of all men else, would surely recognise and strongly grasp the great privilege of solitude amid the sweetest and most soothing adjuncts of natural beauty. That privilege he found in the sparkling and fragrant gardens of Warwick, the woods, fields and waters of the Avon, where he had played as a boy, and where love had laid its first kiss upon his lips and poetry first opened upon his inspired vision the eternal glories of her celestial world. It still abides there, for every gentle soul that can feel its influence—to deepen the glow of noble passion, to soften the sting of grief, and to touch the lips of worship with a fresh sacrament of patience and beauty.
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THE ANNE HATHAWAY COTTAGE.
April, 1892.—A record that all lovers of the Shakespeare shrines have long wished to make can at last be made. The Anne Hathaway Cottage has been bought for the British Nation, and that building will henceforth be one of the Amalgamated Trusts that are guarded by the corporate authorities of Stratford. The other Trusts are the Birthplace, the Museum, and New Place. The Mary Arden Cottage, the home of Shakespeare's mother, is yet to be acquired.
