Here first, at Fancy's fairy-circled shrine,
Of daisies pied his infant offering made;
Here playful yet, in stripling years unripe,
Framed of thy reeds a shrill and artless pipe, -
Sudden thy beauties, Avon, all are fled,
As at the waving of some magic wand:
An holy trance my charméd spirit wings,
And awful shapes of warriors and of kings
People the busy mead,

Like spectres swarming to the wizard's hall;
And slowly pace, and point with trembling hand
The wounds ill-covered by the purple pall.
Before me Pity seems to stand

A weeping mourner, smote with anguish sore,
To see Misfortune rend in frantic mood
His robe, with regal woes embroidered o'er.
Pale Terror leads the visionary band,

And sternly shakes his sceptre, dropping blood.

Thomas Warton.

SHAKESPEARE.

HOU soft-flowing Avon, by thy silver stream

THOU

Of things more than mortal sweet Shakespeare would dream,

The fairies by moonlight dance round his green bed For hallowed the turf is which pillowed his head.

The love-stricken maiden, the soft-sighing swain, Here rove without danger, and sigh without pain: The sweet bud of beauty no blight shall here dread, For hallowed the turf is which pillowed his head.

Here youth shall be famed for their love and their

truth,

And cheerful old age feel the spirit of youth;

For the raptures of fancy here poets shall tread,
For hallowed the turf is that pillowed his head.

Flow on, silver Avon, in song ever flow!

Be the swans on thy borders still whiter than snow! Ever full be thy stream, like his fame may it spread! And the turf ever hallowed which pillowed his head. David Garrick.

WHA

ON SHAKESPEARE, 1630.

HAT needs my Shakespeare for his honored bones
The labor of an age in piléd stones,

Or that his hallowed reliques should be hid

Under a star-ypointing pyramid ?

Dear son of memory, great heir of fame,

What need'st thou such weak witness of thy name? Thou in our wonder and astonishment

Hast built thyself a livelong monument.

For whilst to the shame of slow endeavoring art
Thy easy numbers flow, and that each heart
Hath from the leaves of thy unvalued book
Those Delphic lines with deep impression took;
Then thou our fancy of itself bereaving,
Dost make us marble with too much conceiving;
And so sepulchred, in such pomp dost lie,
That kings for such a tomb would wish to die.

John Milton.

SHAKESPEARE'S MONUMENT AT STRATFORD-UPON-AVON.

YREAT Homer's birth seven rival cities claim,

GREA

Too mighty such monopoly of fame;

Yet not to birth alone did Homer owe

His wondrous worth; what Egypt could bestow,
With all the schools of Greece and Asia joined,
Enlarged the immense expansion of his mind.
Nor yet unrivalled the Mæonian strain,
The British Eagle, and the Mantuan Swan
Tower equal heights. But, happier Stratford, thou
With incontested laurels deck thy brow;

Thy Bard was thine unschooled, and from thee brought
More than all Egypt, Greece, or Asia taught.
Not Homer's self such matchless honors won;
The Greek has rivals, but thy Shakespeare none.

STRATFORD-ON-AVON.

Anonymous.

T

O Stratford-on-the-Avon. And we passed

Through aisles and avenues of the princeliest trees

That ever eyes beheld. None such with us

Here in the bleaker North. And as we went

Through Lucy's park, the red day dropt i' the west;
A crimson glow, like blood in lovers' cheeks,
Spread up the soft green sky and passed away;
The mazy twilight came down on the lawns,
And all those huge trees seemed to fall asleep;
The deer went past like shadows. All the park

Lay round us like a dream; and one fine thought
Hung over us, and hallowed all. Yea, he,
The pride of England, glistened like a star,
And beckoned us to Stratford.

Robert Leighton.

STRATFORD-ON-AVON AT NIGHT.

TWENT

VENTY-SEVEN paces in front,
And barely eleven deep,

Lights in every window but it,
Are they dead, or do they sleep?

The merry gossips of Stratford
Gossip in shops all round,

From that untenanted mansion
There cometh not a sound.

If

you knock you will get no answer,

Knock reverently and low,

For the sake of one who was living there

Three hundred years ago.

He was born in the upper chamber,

Had playmates down the street;

They noted at school, when he read the lesson,
That his voice was soft and sweet.

His father, they say, was a glover,
Though that is not so clear;
He married his sweetheart at Shottery,

When he came to his nineteenth year.

And then he left old Stratford,
And nobody missed him much,
For Stratford, a thriving burgh,
Took little account of such.

But somehow it came to be whispered,
When some short years had flown,
That the glover's son was making himself
A credit to that good town.

The best folks scarcely believed it,
And dreamily shook their head,
But the world was owning the archer
Whose arrows of light had sped;

Whose arrows were brightening space
With fire unknown before,
Plucked from a grander quiver
Than Phoebus-Apollo bore.

So his birthplace came to be famous,

And the ground where his bones were laid,
And to Stratford, the thriving burgh,
Nations their pilgrimage made.

They saw the tenantless dwelling,
They saw the bare flat stone;

But the soul that had brightened the world
Still lived to brighten their own.

And they learned the sacred lesson,
That he whom the proud eschew,
The simplest and the lowliest,
May have God's best work to do.

Henry Glassford Bell.