things that Henry Ward Beecher has said, nothing, perhaps, is more impressive than his account of his partaking of the communion at that altar in the church where Shakspeare rests.  A memory more divine than his overshadowed the place, and he thought of Shakspeare, “as he thought of ten thousand things, without the least disturbance of his devotion,” though he was kneeling directly over the poet’s dust.

If you will stroll over to Shottery now with me, we can see the Ann Hathaway cottage from four different points, which will leave nothing outside of it to be seen.  Better to look at than to live in.  A fearful old place, full of small vertebrates that squeak and smaller articulates that bite, if its outward promise can be trusted.  A thick thatch covers it like a coarse-haired hide.  It is patched together with bricks and timber, and partly crusted with scaling plaster.  One window has the diamond panes framed in lead, such as we remember seeing of old in one or two ancient dwellings in the town of Cambridge, hard by.  In this view a young man is sitting, pensive, on the steps which Master William, too ardent lover, used to climb with hot haste and descend with lingering delay.  Young men die, but youth lives.  Life goes on in the cottage just as it used to three hundred years ago.  On the rail before the door sits the puss of the household, of the fiftieth generation, perhaps, from that “harmless, necessary cat” which purred round the poet’s legs as he sat talking love with Ann Hathaway.  At the foot of the steps is a huge basin, and over the rail hangs—­a dishcloth, drying.  In these homely accidents of the very instant, that cut across our romantic ideals with the sharp edge of reality, lies one of the ineffable charms of the sun-picture.  It is a little thing that gives life to a scene or a face; portraits are never absolutely alive, because they do not wink.

Come, we are full of Shakspeare; let us go up among the hills and see where another poet lived and lies.  Here is Rydal Mount, the home of Wordsworth.  Two-storied, ivy-clad, hedge-girdled, dropped into a crease among the hills that look down dimly from above, as if they were hunting after it as ancient dames hunt after a dropped thimble.  In these walks he used to go “booing about,” as his rustic neighbor had it,—­reciting his own verses.  Here is his grave in Grasmere.  A plain slab, with nothing but his name.  Next him lies Dora, his daughter, beneath a taller stone bordered with a tracery of ivy, and bearing in relief a lamb and a cross.  Her husband lies next in the range.  The three graves have just been shorn of their tall grass,—­in this other view you may see them half-hidden by it.  A few flowering stems have escaped the scythe in the first picture, and nestle close against the poet’s headstone.  Hard by sleeps poor Hartley Coleridge, with a slab of freestone graven with a cross and a crown of thorns, and the legend, “By thy Cross and Passion, Good Lord, deliver us."[A] All around