“Look here,” says Rosalind, “what I found on a palm tree.”  “A palm tree in the forest of Arden,” remarks Steevens, “is as much out of place as a lioness in the subsequent scene.”  Collier tries to get rid of the difficulty by suggesting that Shakespeare may have written plane tree.  “Both the remark and the suggestion,” observes Miss Baker, “might have been spared if those gentlemen had been aware that in the counties bordering on the Forest of Arden, the name of an exotic tree is transferred to an indigenous one.”  The salix caprea, or goat-willow, is popularly known as the “palm” in Northamptonshire, no doubt from having been used for the decoration of churches on Palm Sunday—­its graceful yellow blossoms, appearing at a time when few other trees have put forth a leaf, having won for it that distinction.  Clare so calls it:—­

    “Ye leaning palms, that seem to look
    Pleased o’er your image in the brook.”

That Shakespeare included the willow in his forest scenery is certain, from another passage in the same play:—­

    “West of this place, down in the neighbour bottom. 
    The rank of osiers by the murmuring stream,
    Left on your right hand brings you to the place.”

The customs and amusements of Northamptonshire, which are frequently noticed in these volumes, were identical with those of the neighbouring county of Warwick, and, in like manner illustrate very clearly many passages in the great dramatist.—­Miss Baker’s “Glossary of Northamptonshire Words.” (Quoted by the London Athenaeum.)

[037] Mrs. Hemans once took up her abode for some weeks with Wordsworth at Rydal Mount, and was so charmed with the country around, that she was induced to take a cottage called Dove’s Nest, which over-looked the lake of Windermere.  But tourists and idlers so haunted her retreat and so worried her for autographs and Album contributions, that she was obliged to make her escape.  Her little cottage and garden in the village of Wavertree, near Liverpool, seem to have met the fate which has befallen so many of the residences of the poets.  “Mrs. Hemans’s little flower-garden” (says a late visitor) “was no more—­but rank grass and weeds sprang up luxuriously; many of the windows were broken; the entrance gate was off its hinges:  the vine in front of the house trailed along the ground, and a board, with ‘This house to let’ upon it, was nailed on the door.  I entered the deserted garden and looked into the little parlour—­once so full of taste and elegance; it was gloomy and cheerless.  The paper was spotted with damp, and spiders had built their webs in the corner.  As I mused on the uncertainty of human life, I exclaimed with the eloquent Burke,—­’What shadows we are, and what shadows we pursue!’”