The funeral train of Shakespeare, on that dark day when it moved from New Place to Stratford Church, had but a little way to go. The river, surely, must have seemed to hush its murmurs, the trees to droop their branches, the sunshine to grow dim--as that sad procession passed! His grave is under the gray pavement of the chancel, near the altar, and his wife and one of his daughters are buried beside him. The pilgrim who reads upon the gravestone those rugged lines of grievous entreaty and awful imprecation that guard the poet's rest feels no doubt that he is listening to his living voice--for he has now seen the enchanting beauty of the place, and he has now felt what passionate affection it can inspire. Feeling and not manner would naturally have prompted that abrupt, agonised supplication and threat. Nor does such a pilgrim doubt, when gazing on the painted bust, above the grave,--made by Gerard Jonson, stonecutter,--that he beholds the authentic face of Shakespeare. It is not the heavy face of the portraits that represent it. There is a rapt, transfigured quality in it, that those copies do not convey. It is thoughtful, austere, and yet benign. Shakespeare was a hazel-eyed man, with auburn hair, and the colours that he wore were scarlet and black. Being painted, and also being set up at a considerable height on the church wall, the bust does not disclose what is sufficiently perceptible in a cast from it--that it is the copy of a mask from the dead face. One of the cheeks is a little swollen and the tongue, slightly protruded, is caught between the lips. The idle theory that the poet was not a gentleman of consideration in his own time and place falls utterly and for ever from the mind when you stand at his grave. No man could have a more honourable or sacred place of sepulture; and while it illustrates the profound esteem of the community in which he lived it testifies to the religious character by which that esteem was confirmed. "I commend my soul into the hands of God, my Creator, hoping, and assuredly believing, through the only merits of Jesus Christ, my Saviour, to be made partaker of life everlasting." So said Shakespeare, in his last Will, bowing in humble reverence the mightiest mind--as vast and limitless in the power to comprehend as to express!--that ever wore the garments of mortality.¹