Here you see the Shakspeare House as it was,--wedged in between, and joined to, the "Swan and Maidenhead" Tavern and a mean and dilapidated brick building, not much worse than itself, however. The first improvement (as you see in No. 2) was to pull down this brick building. The next (as you see in No. 3)--was to take away the sign and the bay-window of the "Swan and Maidenhead" and raise two gables out of its roof, so as to restore something like its ancient aspect. Then a rustic fence was put up and the outside arrangements were completed. The cracked and faded sign projects as we remember it of old. In No. 1 you may read "THE IMMORTAL SHAKES_peare ... Born in This House_" about as well as if you had been at the trouble and expense of going there. But here is the back of the house. Did little Will use to look out at this window with the bull's-eye panes? Did he use to drink from this old pump, or the well in which it stands? Did his shoulders rub against this angle of the old house, built with rounded bricks? It a strange picture, and sets us dreaming. Let us go in and up-stairs. In this room he was born. They say so, and we will believe it. Rough walls, rudely boarded floor, wide window with small panes, small bust of him between two cactuses in bloom on window-seat. An old table covered with prints and stereographs, a framed picture, and under it a notice "Copies of this Portrait" ... the rest, in fine print, can only be conjectured. Here is the Church of the Holy Trinity, in which he lies buried. The trees are bare that surround it; see the rooks' nests in their tops. The Avon is hard by, dammed just here, with flood-gates, like a canal. Change the season, if you like,--here are the trees in leaf, and in their shadow the tombs and graves of the mute, inglorious citizens of Stratford. Ah, how natural this interior, with its great stained window, its mural monuments, and its slab in the pavement with the awful inscription! That we cannot see here, but there is the tablet with the bust we know so well. But this, after all, is Christ's temple, not Shakspeare's. Here are the worshippers' seats,--mark how the polished wood glistens,--there is the altar, and there the open prayer-book,--you can almost read the service from it. Of the many striking things that Henry Ward Beecher has said, nothing, perhaps, is more impressive than his account of his partaking of the communion at that altar in the church where Shakspeare rests. A memory more divine than his overshadowed the place, and he thought of Shakspeare, "as he thought of ten thousand things, without the least disturbance of his devotion," though he was kneeling directly over the poet's dust.