But we must not, and cannot reckon the Stratford poet as a paragon of all the virtues; his long London absences, for cause or for want of cause--or both--may have given many twinges of pain to his own mother (of Arden blood), and to the mother of his children. Yet after the date of his boy’s death, up to the time of his final return to Stratford there are evidences of very frequent home visits, and of large interest in what concerned his family and towns-people. His journeyings to and fro, probably on horseback, may have taken him by way of Edgehill, and into Banbury (of “Banbury-Cross” buns); or, more likely, he would have followed the valley of the Stour by Shipston, and thence up the hills to Chipping-Norton, and skirting Whichwood Forest, which still darkens a twelve-mile stretch of land upon the right, and so by Ditchley and the great Woodstock Park, into Oxford. I recall these names and the succession of scenes the more distinctly, for the reason that some forty years ago I went over the whole stretch of road from Windsor to Stratford on foot, staying the nights at wayside inns, and lunching at little, mossy hostelries, some of which the poet may possibly have known, and looking out wonderingly and reverently for glimpses of wood, or field, or flood, that may have caught the embalmment of his verse. It was worth getting up betimes to verify such lines as these:-- “Full many a glorious morning have I seen Kissing with golden face the meadows green, Gilding pale streams with heavenly alchemy;” or those others, telling how the gentle day “Dapples the drowsy East with spots of gray.” Again, there was delightful outlook for “----a bank whereon the wild thyme blows Where oxlips and the nodding violet grows;” or, perhaps it was the “Summer’s green, all girded up in sheaves” that caught the eye; or, yet again, the picturesque hedge-rows, which, Like prisoners overgrown with hair Put forth disordered twigs; and these flanked by some “----even mead, which erst brought sweetly forth The freckled cowslip, burnet, and green clover.”