Shakespeare’s feeling for Nature and love of outdoor life are nowhere more fully and admirably expressed than in his delightful Play of _As You Like It_. Pervaded by the very breath of the country and the charms of rural life and sylvan peace, the chief scenes of this drama are laid in a landscape that was doubtless based on recollections of his youthful home, and he appropriately named it after his own “Forest of Arden” in Warwickshire. He transports us to a green woodland, interspersed with copses of hawthorns and brambles, revealing grassy glades among venerable trees, where flocks of sheep and goats are pasturing, while here and there we catch sight of a quiet herd of deer. We meet, too, with shepherds and foresters, and come upon a cottage near the rank osiers by a murmuring stream. Now and then our attention is drawn to some specially picturesque feature in the timber of the forest, such as “an oak whose antique root peeps out upon the brook that brawls along the wood.”[18] Or we are halted Under an oak, whose boughs were moss’d with age, And high top bald with dry antiquity.[19] And there are smooth-stemmed beech-trees, on the massive trunks of which a love-sick swain may carve the name of his beloved. [Sidenote: _His picture of English Landscape_] Into this essentially English scenery the poet introduces a fence of olive-trees around the sheep-cote, likewise “a green and gilded snake,” together with a “hungry lioness” that lies crouching on the ground, ready to spring upon a man when he awakes from sleep. But these productions of other climes were, from the dramatist’s point of view, no more out of place in his forest, than was the presence of a banished duke with his company of lords and attendants. He had created an ideal landscape out of his own Forest of Arden, and he might clothe it with such vegetation and people it with such beings as he thought that the claims of his art allowed. Among the first sounds that greet our ears after we enter this land of enchantment are those of an invitation to hear the bird-music: Under the greenwood tree Who loves to lie with me, And turn his merry note Unto the sweet bird’s throat, Come hither, come hither, come hither. Here shall he see No enemy But winter and rough weather.[20] And in nearly the last strains that reach us before the drama closes, the carol of the birds comes in again: In the spring time, the only pretty ring time, When birds do sing, hey ding a ding, ding: Sweet lovers love the spring.[21] It will be remembered that the contemplation of the woodland peace and happiness of the Forest of Arden inspired the poet with one of the most pregnant passages to be found in his works. Though the quotation has become rather hackneyed from constant use, it deserves to be treasured in the heart of everyone to whom the study of Nature is dear: