And this our life, exempt from public haunt, Finds tongues in trees, books in the running brooks, Sermons in stones, and good in everything.[22] [Sidenote: _His Sympathy with Life_] In this pastoral drama, and throughout his Poems and Plays, Shakespeare manifests the keen pleasure with which the face of Nature filled his soul. The beauty and fragrancy of flowers and woods, the movements and music of birds were a joy to him. But he combined with this enjoyment a feeling of pity for the frailty and suffering of living things. A recent and most able writer on Shakespeare has stated as his opinion that “the wild creatures of the fields and woods, because they have never run the risk of familiarity with man, are outside the circle of Shakespeare’s sympathetic observation.” I venture to think that a more mistaken judgement could hardly have been pronounced. Shakespeare was not a man of science, but he obviously had some of the best qualities of a naturalist――quickness and accuracy of eye and sympathy with life, not of man only, but of every creature that lives and feels. This sympathy shows itself in his allusions to birds, but is displayed also in his references to animals both higher and lower in the scale of being, which “have never run the risk of familiarity with man.” In the remarkable Play which we have just been considering it is conspicuously prominent. The banished Duke in the Forest of Arden asks his companions if they will go with him to kill some venison, but before their answer comes, he immediately adds, on reflection: And yet it irks me the poor dappled fools, Being native burghers of this desert city, Should in their own confines with forked heads Have their round haunches gored.[23] This commiseration is expressed much more forcibly by one of his “co-mates and brothers in exile,” the melancholy Jaques, who had been overheard, as he lay under an oak near the brook, lamenting the fate of a wounded stag that had come to languish at the same spot. As he watched the creature [Sidenote: _The Wounded Deer_] weeping into the needless stream; ‘Poor deer,’ quoth he, ‘thou makest a testament As worldlings do, giving thy sum of more To that which had too much;’ then, being there alone, Left and abandon’d of his velvet friends; ‘’Tis right,’ quoth he; ‘thus misery doth part The flux of company:’ anon, a careless herd, Full of the pasture, jumps along by him And never stays to greet him; ‘Ay,’ quoth Jaques, ‘Sweep on, you fat and greasy citizens; ’Tis just the fashion: wherefore do you look Upon that poor and broken bankrupt there?’ Thus most invectively he pierceth through The body of the country, city, court, Yea, and of this our life; swearing that we Are mere usurpers, tyrants and what’s worse, To fright the animals and to kill them up In their assign’d and native dwelling-place.[24]