"My mother had a maid call'd Barbara," says Desdemona, standing unwittingly upon the threshold of death, "She had a song of 'willow'; An old thing 'twas, _but it expressed the future_, And she died singing it. That song, to-night, Will not go from my head." The most apparently casual and irrelevant ditties of Shakespeare's dramas, in like manner, "express the future" of the story. "Come unto these yellow sands, And there take hands".... So, eventually, Ferdinand and Miranda avow their mutual love beside the lapping of the long blue waves. "Under the greenwood tree Who loves to lie with me,"-- might be the very _leit-motiv_ of _As You Like It_. "Sigh no more, ladies,--ladies, sigh no more, Men were deceivers ever: One foot on sea, and one on shore, To one thing constant never,"-- --here you have the treachery of Don John, and the vacillating mistrust of Claudio, succinctly summed up. "Journeys end in lovers' meeting, Every wise man's son doth know,"-- thus the Clown in _Twelfth Night_ becomes mouthpiece of the _dénouement_ which was never long in doubt. To every man his _métier_: and that of William Shakespeare was not to be the mouthpiece of those "spacious times," tingling with sensation, with excitement, with huge enterprise. Exhibiting, throughout, the curious patient persistence of the essential Midlander, he had worked his way right up from the bottom rung of the ladder. The ill-mated young man of twenty-three, who had left Stratford with a travelling company of players in 1587,--who had (whether conscious or unconscious of his genius) plodded industriously onward as a literary hack of drama--tinkering, adapting, re-shaping and re-writing the stale old stock plays, until they suffered a change "into something rich and strange,"--whose colossal greatness his contemporaries were not great enough to appreciate;--that same man was now arriving--like so many other Midlanders--at a point where criticism could not touch him. He had gained no giddy pinnacle of sudden success, but a safe and solid summit of assured position. That he should attain it in his own way, and after his own methods,--that, after all, was his business. There were plenty of other poets to utter _Arma virumque cano_. William Shakespeare preferred to link himself with thoughts of Italy, and fairy-folk, and "the sea-coast of Bohemia,"--with youth and palaces and forests, and fortunate or frustrate love. His range and scope were enormous, if he cared: his output astonishing, if he chose.... Meanwhile, it was mid-summer and there were roses.... * * * * * "Ferdinand and Miranda avow their mutual love, beside the lapping of the long blue waves." _Ferdinand._ Here's my hand. _Miranda._ And mine, with my heart in't. (_The Tempest_). [Illustration: FERDINAND AND MIRANDA. _Painting by Edmund Dulac_.]