Page:Walks in the Black Country and its green border-land.pdf/454

440 by the sunny side of the peaceful river, has the name of the little town been mentioned without suggesting and meaning him. Many a populous city is proud of the smallest segment of a great man's glory. "He was born here." That is a great thing to say, and they say it with exultation, showing this heirloom of honour to strangers as the richest inheritance of the town. But being born in a particular place is more a matter of accident than of personal option. No one chooses his own birthplace, and the sheer fact that he there made his entrée into the world, is, after all, a rather negative distinction to those who boast of it. But quiet little Stratford-upon-Avon can say far more than this. Shakespeare was not only born here, but he spent his last days and died here. Nor did he come back to his native town a broken-down old man to be nursed in the last stages of decrepitude and be buried with his fathers. He returned hither at the zenith of his intellectual manhood, to spend the Indian summer of his life in the midst of the sceneries and companionships of his boyhood. Thus no other human memory ever covered so completely with its speculum the name or history of a town, or filled it with such a vivid, vital image as Shakespeare's has done to Stratford-upon-Avon. Here,

"Like footprints hidden by a brook Bat seen on either side,"