has not done as well by her poets as by the rest of her brood. With all her theology, she did not make a churchman out of Swinburne, nor a saint of Herrick, and as for Landor and Shelley, her eyes were holden and she cast them forth.
Of Shakespeare, an alien figure crossing the path of her gowned and hooded doctors, or watching her "young barbarians all at play"--for Oxford lads knew how to play before ever "Eights Week" was thought of--she seems to have remembered nothing save that he stood godfather to his landlady's baby-boy, little William Davenant, in the old Saxon church of St. Michael's. Oxford let him pay his reckoning at the Crown and go his way unnoted. He was none of hers. Even now, when his name is blazoned on rows upon rows of volumes in window after window of Broad Street, I doubt if the Oxford dons would deem Shakespeare capable of editing his own works.
"Where were you bred? And how achieved you these endowments, which You make more rich to owe?"
One would like to fancy that Duke Humphrey's library, beautiful as a library of Paradise, made the poet welcome; but the King's Commissioners had despoiled it in 1550, and more than half a century went by before, toward the close of Shakespeare's life, Sir Thomas Bodley had refounded and refitted it as The Bodleian.
Yet the grey university city, "spreading her gardens to the moonlight, and whispering from her towers the last enchantments of the Middle Age,"--how could she have failed deeply to impress the sensitive spirit of that disregarded wayfarer? Although she had suffered so grievously under the flail of the Reformation, although she was destined to become the battered stronghold of Charles I, the voice within her gates was, and is, not the battle-cry, but the murmurous voice of meditation and dream and prayer. As we enter into the sanctuary of her grave beauty, personal chagrins and the despair of our own brief mortality fall away. The unending life of human thought is here, enduring, achieving, advancing, with its constant miracle of resurrection out of the old form into the new.
Of the counties occupying the Severn basin, three form, in continuation with Cheshire, the Welsh border,--Shropshire, Hereford, and Monmouth. Shropshire, together with the West Midland counties of Worcester and Gloucester, is traversed by the mother stream, but Hereford and Monmouth lie in their respective vales of the tributary Wye and Usk, and Warwickshire, already noted, in the broad basin of the Avon.