Page:Walks in the Black Country and its green border-land.pdf/455

Rh he has left them marks on the sunny banks, and across the soft level meadows basking in the bosom of the little river. The break is not wide between those he made in these favourite walks in his youth and the footprints of his ripe age as a permanent resident and citizen. Perhaps he and his Ann Hathaway, after his London life, delighted to make sunset strolls across the daisied fields to the cottage of her childhood and of their first love and troth. Never before or since did a transcendent genius make so much history for the world and so little for himself as Shakespeare. Here is the quaint little house in which he was born. It has been painted, engraved, photographed, and described ad infinitum. You will find a hundred pictures of it scattered over Christendom where you will find one of Solomon's Temple. Undoubtedly it ranked as a capacious and comfortable dwelling in its day. It is one of the skeleton type so common to the Elizabethan age; that is, the oaken bonework of the frame is even with the brickwork of the outer walls, thus showing the fleshless ribs of the house to the outside world. The rooms are small, and very low between joints; still the one assigned by tradition as the birthplace of the great poet is large enough for the greatest of men to be born in. Its ceiling overhead and side walls, however, afford too scant tablet-space for the registry of the names of