Strangely enough, in Shakespeare's dramas, like those of Kâlidâsa, we find a secret vein of complaint against the artificial life of the king's court—the life of ungrateful treachery and falsehood. And almost everywhere, in his dramas, foreign scenes have been introduced in connection with some working of the life of unscrupulous ambition. It is perfectly obvious in _Timon of Athens_—but there Nature offers no message or balm to the injured soul of man. In _Cymbeline_ the mountainous forest and the cave appear in their aspect of obstruction to life's opportunities. These only seem tolerable in comparison with the vicissitudes of fortune in the artificial court life. In _As You Like It_ the forest of Arden is didactic in its lessons. It does not bring peace, but preaches, when it says: Hath not old custom made this life more sweet Than that of painted pomp? Are not these woods More free from peril than the envious court? In the _Tempest_, through Prospero's treatment of Ariel and Caliban we realise man's struggle with Nature and his longing to sever connection with her. In _Macbeth_, as a prelude to a bloody crime of treachery and treason, we are introduced to a scene of barren heath where the three witches appear as personifications of Nature's malignant forces; and in _King Lear_ it is the fury of a father's love turned into curses by the ingratitude born of the unnatural life of the court that finds its symbol in the storm on the heath. The tragic intensity of _Hamlet_ and _Othello_ is unrelieved by any touch of Nature's eternity. Except in a passing glimpse of a moonlight night in the love scene in the _Merchant of Venice_, Nature has not been allowed in other dramas of this series, including _Romeo and Juliet_ and _Antony and Cleopatra_, to contribute her own music to the music of man's love. In _The Winter's Tale_ the cruelty of a king's suspicion stands bare in its relentlessness, and Nature cowers before it, offering no consolation. I hope it is needless for me to say that these observations are not intended to minimise Shakespeare's great power as a dramatic poet, but to show in his works the gulf between Nature and human nature owing to the tradition of his race and time. It cannot be said that beauty of nature is ignored in his writings; only he fails to recognise in them the truth of the inter-penetration of human life with the cosmic life of the world. We observe a completely different attitude of mind in the later English poets like Wordsworth and Shelley, which can be attributed in the main to the great mental change in Europe, at that particular period, through the influence of the newly discovered philosophy of India which stirred the soul of Germany and aroused the attention of other Western countries.