Page:Stories from Old English Poetry-1899.djvu/162

140 must have been to Will to get such prizes into his possession, and to go off to read by himself. When by chance he may have have obtained the wonderful poem of “Romeus and Juliet,” how glad he must have been to carry it off with him to the shade of some clustering trees, through which the lovely river Avon flowed, and there to read it aloud till he wept at the cruel fate of the two lovers.

All these things, however, must be partly guessed at, for no one dreamed that this boy would become so great a poet, and no one of that day has taken the trouble to tell us anything about him when he was a child. He lived in Stratford till he was about eighteen, and then he married a farmer’s daughter in the neighborhood, named Anne Hathaway. She was a young woman much older than himself, and no doubt it was a foolish act of his to marry so young. It is to be feared he found it hard work to take care of his family, for in two or three years after his marriage he set out for the great city of London, Jike a boy in a fairy tale, to seek his fortune. And a wonderful fortune it was, greater than Dick Whittington’s, or that of any other unfriended youth who ever came, solitary and unknown, to a great busy city.

When he got to London he found that nearly