Lastly, the song which winds up “Love’s Labor Lost,”—with what lyric sweetness it condenses how much of flowery spring and of nipping winter into a few easy lines! In this as in all other mentions of wild-flowers in Shakespeare, it has been remarked how true he is to time and season, giving to each flower its proper season and haunt, and sorting them all with the careless ease of one to whom they were among the most familiar things. In this he contrasts with the artistic but not accurate assortment of flowers in the well-known passage of “Lycidas,” where Milton groups in one posy flowers belonging to different seasons. On the whole, though Shakespeare never set himself formally to study or describe external Nature, yet his dramas are full of her presence and her works—not taken from books or daintily tricked out by art, but idealized from his memory well stored with country scenes. Again, these are given, not in elaborate descriptions, but in rapid strokes, and side-glances, vivid, penetrating, intense, thrown off from the heat of an imagination brooding mainly over human interests and emotions. And perhaps after all that view of Nature is the truest, healthiest, manliest, which does not pore or moralize over her appearances, but keeps them in the background, putting man into the foreground and making him the central object. As Man and Nature stand over against each other, and are evidently made each for each, it may be that not apart from Man, with his emotions and his destiny, can Nature be rightly conceived and portrayed. MILTON.