Page:Walks in the Black Country and its green border-land.pdf/453



ND this is Stratford-upon-Avon? Is there another town in Christendom to equal human memory? Let him who thinks he can say there is tell us where the like may be found. London is the birth-and-burial place of a large number of distinguished poets, philosophers, statesmen, and heroes. Their lives make for it a nebulous lustre. The orbits of their brilliant careers overlap upon each other, so that their individual paths of light, intersecting in their common illumination, like netted sunbeams, do not make any vivid or distinctive lines over the face or over the history of the great city. But the memory of Shakespeare covers with its disk the whole life and being and history, ancient and modern, of Stratford-upon-Avon. There is nothing seen or felt before or behind it but William Shakespeare. In no quarter of the globe, since he was laid to his last sleep