You can sit in an antique chair, in a corner of this room, and think unutterable things. There is, certainly, no word that can even remotely suggest the feeling with which you are then overwhelmed. You can sit also in the room below, in the seat, in the corner of the wide fireplace, that Shakespeare himself must often have occupied. They keep but a few sticks of furniture in any part of the cottage. One room is devoted to Shakespearean relics--more or less authentic; one of which is a schoolboy's desk that was obtained from the old grammar-school in Church Street in which Shakespeare was once a pupil. At the back of the cottage, now isolated from contiguous structures, is a pleasant garden, and at one side is a cosy, luxurious little cabin--the home of order and of pious decorum--for the ladies who are custodians of the Shakespeare House. If you are a favoured visitor, you may receive from that garden, at parting, all the flowers, prettily mounted upon a sheet of paper, that poor Ophelia names, in the scene of her madness. "There's rosemary, that's for remembrance: and there is pansies, that's for thoughts: there's fennel for you, and columbines: there's rue for you: there's a daisy:--I would give you some violets, but they withered all when my father died." The minute knowledge that Shakespeare had of plants and flowers, and the loving appreciation with which he describes pastoral scenery, are explained to the rambler in Stratford, by all that he sees and hears. There is a walk across the fields to Shottery that the poet must often have taken, in the days of his courtship of Anne Hathaway. The path to this hamlet passes through pastures and gardens, necked everywhere with those brilliant scarlet poppies that are so radiant and so bewitching in the English landscape. To have grown up amid such surroundings, and, above all, to have experienced amid them the passion of love, must have been, for Shakespeare, the intuitive acquirement of ample and specific knowledge of their manifold beauties. It would be hard to find a sweeter rustic retreat than Anne Hathaway's cottage is, even now. Tall trees embower it; and over its porches, and all along its picturesque, irregular front, and on its thatched roof, the woodbine and the ivy climb, and there are wild roses and the maiden's blush. For the young poet's wooing no place could be fitter than this. He would always remember it with tender-joy. Illustration: "Approach to Shottery."