On every bough the briddes herde I singe With voys of aungel in hir armonye.[3] Again, in his quaint and humorous verses on the _Cuckow and the Nightingale_, the poet transports us into the very heart of the woods to hear a discourse between these two harbingers of summer. For the nightingale he had a fondness which is lovingly expressed in the _Flower and the Leaf_, where we find the picture of a woodland of oaks whose new leaves Sprongen out ayein the sonne shene, Some very rede, and some a glad light grene; Which, as me thought, was right a plesaunt sight, And eek the briddes songes for to here Would have rejoised any erthly wight; And I, that couth not yet, in no manere, Here the Nightingale of al the yeare, Ful busily herkned with herte and ere, If I her voice perceive coud any-where.[4] This simple delight in the voices of the birds, so prominent in the poems of the author of the _Canterbury Tales_, was maintained among his successors in English poetry. By Elizabethan times, however, it had become enlarged and enriched by the growth of a more observant and contemplative habit. The spontaneous and irresistible joy of the human soul in the varied beauty of Nature, and not least in the bird-music of the fields and woods, is as marked in Shakespeare’s works as it was in those of Chaucer; but it is now combined with more thought and reflection. The appreciation of life in all its divers forms has grown closer, more sympathetic and more intimately linked with human experience. [Sidenote: _Surroundings of his Boyhood_] Shakespeare had the good fortune to be born in one of the pleasantest and most varied districts of England, in the midst of fields and gardens, as well as wide tracts of woodland and heath, among sturdy farmer-folk, and simple peasantry. The face of open Nature lay spread out around him, and his earliest poems bear witness to the range and acuteness of his faculty of observation amid the fields and forests, the beasts and birds of his home. The extent and accuracy of his acquaintance with law have been claimed as proof that he had passed through some legal training. There is sounder evidence that his remarkable familiarity with objects of natural history could not have been derived at secondhand from books, but was acquired from his own personal observation. His youthful surroundings in Warwickshire furnished him with ample opportunity of acquiring and cultivating this knowledge. Nor should it be forgotten that the London in which he spent the active years of his middle life, was a comparatively small town. Open country lay within a short walking distance from any part of it. Heaths and woodlands, with all their riches of animal life, extended almost up to its outskirts. So that even in the height of his busy theatrical career the dramatist could easily, at any interval of leisure, renew his acquaintance with the face of Nature which he dearly loved.