“Come, seeling night, Skarf up the tender eye of pitiful day; And, with thy bloody and invisible hand, Cancel, and tear to pieces, that great bond Which keeps me pale!—Light thickens, and the crow Makes wing to the rooky wood; Good things of day begin to droop and drowse, While night’s black agents to their prey do rouse.” But why go on quoting passages, which all remember, to show how exactly all through this or the other dramas the face of Nature answers to the deeds and the emotions of the human agents, and how a line—sometimes a word in the midst of a rapid dialogue—lets in the open air, and all the surrounding nature, more tellingly than pages of description could have done. But between Shakespeare and a modern poet there is this great difference, that, while in the latter this correspondence is attained by careful study and elaborate forethought, in Shakespeare we may well believe that the white heat of imagination which created and moulded the characters in all their throng of emotion struck off, at the same moment, almost unconsciously, the aspects of external nature which were proper to them. The forest was evidently with Shakespeare a favorite resort, bringing back to him, as it would, recollections of his youthful deer-huntings. In his day the forest was not far off or strange, but still a familiar place, as we are told, coming up very close to the gates of the country town. From Stratford-on-Avon he had not far to go before he found himself in the midst of the forest of fine oaks, the survivors of which are still seen all about in the parks and lanes of Warwickshire. So when he would spend the summer night in the most extravagant mirth and drollery, it is out to the wild wood that he leads his company; when he would surround the grave thoughts of the exiled Duke and the melancholy of Jaques with a congenial background, he places them in the Forest of Arden, where free Nature fits into the mood, and brings soothing to their mental maladies. “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 how many ways throughout these plays are the aspects of human life set forth by their resemblances in Nature!