“The mother of William Shakespeare, Mary Arden, was a great and noble woman. Words elude me when I attempt to describe her! Soul secretes body, and how can I have you see the dwelling-place of this great and lofty spirit as I now behold it with my inward eyes? Tall, rather than otherwise, a willowy lithe form that was strong as whalebone, yet at first you would have thought her delicate; hair light, inclining to auburn, wavy; her eyes heaven’s own blue, with a dreamy far-away expression, not fixed on things of earth, but looking into the beyond. She saw things others never saw, she heard music that came not to the ears of others. Her face I cannot describe! Some envious women said she was homely, for her features were rather large and irregular; but a few saw in that face the look of gentle greatness, for the really great are always gentle and modest. They speak with lowered voice--they hesitate. Is it fear? They are silent when we say they should affirm--and Pilate marveled. “This woman bore eight children, four boys and four girls. Only one of these attained eminence--this was her third child. The others were born under seemingly equal favorable circumstances, but the spirit she called to her when she conceived in that year 1563, was of a different nature from that which prevailed with the other seven. She was then thirty-one years old; her mind working in the direction of the Ideal; her life calm; all of the surroundings at their best. But we must hasten on.” I had brought my stenographic notebook, and almost from the first I took the words of The Man exact, as I feared I would not remember them. We were seated on a log under the great pine-trees, and as The Man talked slowly, I got the exact words as I give them to you in this book. The Man continued: “John Shakespeare was not the equal of his wife by any means, but a good man withal, who loved his wife and feared her just a little. She was good and gentle, yet so self-reliant in spite of her seeming sensitiveness, that the good man could never fully comprehend her; but he ever treated her with the awkward yet becoming tenderness of the great, strong, hairy, simple-hearted man that he was. “William caused his parents more trouble and sorrow than all the other children together. They could not comprehend him at all. He was smart, yet would not study; he was strong, yet would not work except by spells. He would disappear from the task at which he had been set, and be found lying on his back out under the trees, looking up through the branches at the great white clouds floating in the sky. He had hiding-places all his own in the woods and glens where he would spend hours alone, and yet in the childish frolics and games of youth he could always hold his own.