The early life of a truly imaginative man had been passed in the most beautiful surroundings that rural England can provide, and by reason, perhaps, of the lack of restrictions, had helped him to enlarge his experiences and develop all the facets of a luminous mind. The expression is chosen deliberately. Man's mind is like a diamond, and experience is the lapidary. Every action, every stroke of good fortune or of bad, leaves its definite mark; every association does the same. As a boy Shakespeare lived in close touch with Nature. His father's business would have brought him into contact with farmers, given him the freedom of their fields, taught him the significance of the seasons. Even now, when glimpses of Elizabethan England are few and far between, we are touched by the supreme peace that still broods over land on which the old-time houses, with their thatched roofs or well-worn tiles, their ingle nooks, their dormer windows, their oak rafters and their many gables, tell of a time when the jerry-builder was not and the suburban villa had not yet come into being. It was an age of beauty, and the walks round Stratford remain beautiful to this hour, despite the growth of villadom and the advent of the railway line. We can follow the roads that Shakespeare knew, to the woods of his poaching exploits, and the meadows over which he passed to thatched, half-timbered Shottery, where the village inn was still standing when men, now middle-aged, were born. Rustic gardens, white-blossomed orchards, tiny brooks beloved by the kingfisher, trees that may have seen the courting of the poet and his wife, still remain to tell the story of England's unchanging charm. In the spring and early summer there is such an atmosphere about the countryside as George Meredith has created in his "Richard Feverel" when Richard and Lucy meet in "the very spring-tide of their youth." Doubtless there are other regions in plenty, scattered through the length and breadth of our fascinating English country, wherein the attractions are hardly less than here; but Shakespeare's genius has hallowed Stratford for us, because that particular countryside made him a poet and sent him to London, full of such inspiration as has not fallen to any other Englishman even in times when the literary activity of the age has been at its highest point. =MARY ARDEN'S COTTAGE= It may be suggested in passing that much of the early romance associated with Anne Hathaway's cottage is spurious, and the worthy people who tell of the poet's courtship there overlook the fact that his relations with his wife were clandestine and his marriage almost a secret union. But the cottage itself is beautiful enough to account for the enthusiastic departure from the path of truth, if not to justify it.