* I cannot help fancying, however, that her familiarity with the events of Shakespeare's life, and of his death and burial (of which she would speak as if she had been present at the the edge of the grave), and all the history, literature, and personalities of the Elizabethan age, together with the prevailing power of her own belief, had really gone some little way toward making a convert of the good clergyman.--Hawthorne. She examined the surface of the gravestone, and en{199}deavored, without stirring it, to estimate whether it were of such thickness as to be capable of containing the archives of the Elizabethan Club. She went over anew the proofs, the clews, the enigmas, the pregnant sentences, which she had discovered in Bacon's letters and elsewhere.... She continued to hover around the church, and seems to have had full freedom of entrance in the day-time, and special license, on one occasion at least, at a late hour at night. She went thither with a dark lantern, which could but twinkle like a glow-worm through the volume of obscurity that filled the great, dusky edifice. Groping her way up the aisle, and toward the chancel, she sat down on the elevated part of the pavement above Shakespeare's grave. She made no attempt to disturb the grave, though, I believe, she looked narrowly into the crevices between Shakespeare's and the two adjacent stones, and in some way satisfied herself that her single strength would suffice to lift the former, in case of need. She threw the feeble rays of her lantern up toward the bust, but could not make it visible beneath the darkness of the vaulted roof.... Several times she heard a low movement in the aisle; a stealthy, dubious footfall prowling about in the darkness, now here, now there, among the pillars and ancient tombs, as if some restless inhabitant of the latter had crept forth to peep at the intruder. By and by the clerk made his appearance, and confessed that he had been watching her ever since she entered the church. This was the nearest she came to the overt act, all thought of which was finally abandoned; for, meanwhile, worn out with the absorbing mental activity of these last years, and her physical privations (she had only ar{200}rived in Stratford in a condition so feeble and prostrated as to have believed herself beyond any necessity of providing any further earthly sustenance; the failure of her book and the miscarriage of her plans did the rest), she finally consented to be borne back to her home to die peacefully at the last, among friends. Her life and her "theory" are only to be discussed together, and both with tenderness. "Was there ever a more wonderful phenomenon?" exclaims Hawthorne--"a system of philosophy, growing up in this woman's mind, without her volition, contrary, in fact, to the determined resistance of her volition, and substituting itself in the place of everything that originally