It seemed to me that this story illustrated more than merely a bird idiosyncrasy.

In a tree at the edge of the little plateau on which Mr. Ingersoll has built his lodge, I was shown a turtle-dove sitting patiently upon her roughly built nest, over the edges of which, on either side, appeared the head and tail feathers of a young bird, evidently almost fully fledged, and altogether too large for the mother to cover any longer. And further down the hillside I was privileged to peep into a yellowbilled cuckoo's nest-a small handful of loosely laid sticks and twigs. My report of the condition of this home caused Mr. Burroughs a good deal of concern. Neither of the parents was in sight, and there was only one egg in the nest. A day or two before, he said, there had been a young bird and an egg there. "I fear that means another tragedy," he said; and those who have read the chapter on the "Tragedies of the Nests," in "Signs and Seasons," will understand his meaning.

If these bits of news from "Slabsides have served to suggest the genius of the place, their purpose has been accomplished. It is hardly an exaggeration to say that every form of life, animate or inanimate, has some definite significance for Mr. Burroughs. That phoebe has become a personality, an individual, to him, not alone because of her rather pathetic absent-mindedness, but because she has let her friend into the secrets of her home

up there under the eaves. And it is so with the turtle-dove of exaggerated maternal instinct; while the disappearance of the infant cuckoo suggests a domestic calamity none the less dire because its exact nature can only be conjectured. I do not believe that Mr. Burroughs ever loses an opportunity to add to his knowledge of bird personality by observation of this kind; and his physical vision, which is well-nigh infallible even now when he has passed the threescore milestone, keeps him constantly supplied with such opportunities. If I mistake not, much of the charm of what he writes is

the result of the expression of this personal familiarity with the birds, this tendency to write definitely and always sympathetically about some one bird. A

Then, too, Mr. Burroughs has the poet's appreciation of the beautiful in the abstract. He knows birds as individuals, but he also knows them as spiritual expressions, and his appreciation of their moods and temperaments prompts some of his most beautiful passages. In the essay on " Birds and Birds," in "Locusts and Wild Honey," he writes:

"The song-birds might all have brooded and hatched in the human heart. They are typical of its highest aspirations, and nearly the whole gamut of human passion and emotion is expressed more or less fully in their varied songs. Among our own birds there is the song of the hermitthrush for devoutness and religious serenity, that of the wood-thrush for the musing, melodious thoughts of twilight, the song-sparrow's for simple faith and trust, the bobolink's for hilarity and glee, the mourning-dove's for hopeless sorrow, the vireo's for all-day and every-day contentment, and the nocturne of the mockingbird for love. There are the plaintive singers, the soaring, ecstatic singers, the confident singers, the gushing and voluble singers, and the half-voiced, inarticulate singers. The note of the pewee is a human sigh, and the chickadee has a voice full of unspeakable tenderness and fidelity. There is pride in the song of the tanager, and vanity in that of the catbird. There is something distinctly human about the robin; his is the note of boyhood. I have thoughts that follow the migrating fowls northward and southward, and that go with the sea-birds into the desert of the ocean as lonely and tireless as they. I sympathize with the watchful crow perched yonder on that tree, or walking about in the fields. I hurry outdoors when I hear the clarion of the wild gander; his comrade in my heart sends back the call."

What may not the voices of Nature say to such a man, and be understood!

T

HE order of the appearance of the Tragedies has not been definitely settled; they were written, however, in the same period, and that period began about 1601 and ended about 1609. The poet was at work on these masterpieces during the closing years of the reign of Elizabeth and the early years of the reign of James First. While he was meditating upon or writing " Julius Cæsar," Essex and Southampton had embarked upon their ill-planned conspiracy, and one had gone to the block and the other was lying in the Tower; soon after finishing "Coriolanus" the poet left London and returned to Stratford. The first decade of the seventeenth century was, therefore, his "storm and stress period. Its chief interest lies in its artistic product, but the possible and probable relations of his artistic activity to his personal experience have been indicated. Those relations must not be insisted upon too strenu

ously; in a sense they are unimportant; the important aspect of the work of this decade lies in the continuity of mood and of themes which it represents, and in the mastery of the dramatic art which it illustrates.

During these years Shakespeare dealt continuously with the deepest problems of character with the clearest insight and the most complete command of the resources of the dramatic art. It is significant of the marvelous harmony of the expert craftsman with the poet of superb imagination that the plays of this period have been at the same time the most popular of all the Shakespearean dramas with theater-goers and the most deeply studied by critical lovers of the poet in all parts of the world.

Shakespeare had read Holinshed and Hall with an insight into historic incident and character quite as marvelous in its power of laying bare the sources of action

and of vitalizing half-forgotten actors in the drama of life as the play of the faculty of invention, and far more fruitful; he now opened the pages of one of the most fascinating and stimulating biographers in the whole range of literature. It is doubtful if any other recorder of men's lives has touched the imagination and influenced the character of so many readers as Plutarch, to whom the modern world owes much of its intimate and vital knowledge of the men who not only shaped the destinies of Greece and Rome, but created the traditions of culture which influenced Shakespeare's age and contemporaries so deeply. Part of Plutarch's extraordinary influence has been due to the inexhaustible interest of his material and part to the charm of his personality. He was and will remain one of the great interpreters of the classical to the modern world; a biographer who breathed the life of feeling and infused the insight of the imagination into his compact narratives. It has well been said of his work that it has been "most sovereign in its dominion over the minds of great men in all ages;" and the same thought has been suggested in another form in the description of that work as "the pasturage of great minds."

English by Thomas North," was published in 1579, while Shakespeare was coming to the end of his school-days in the Grammar School at Stratford, and forms one of that group of translations, including Chapman's "Homer," Florio's "Montaigne," and Fairfax's "Tasso," which, in their influence, must be ranked as original

contributions to Elizabethan literature. Plutarch is not only the foremost biographer in the history of letters; he had the further good fortune to attract a reader who, more than any other, has disclosed the faculty of grasping the potential content of a narrative, as well as mastering its record of fact. It is one of Plutarch's greatest honors that he was the chief feeder of Shakespeare's imagination during the period when his genius. touched its highest mark of achievement; for it was in Plutarch that the poet found the material for three of the greatest of the Tragedies, "Julius Cæsar," "Antony and Cleopatra," and "Coriolanus," and, in part, for "Timon of Athens." Not only did he find his material in Plutarch, but he found passages SO nobly phrased, whole dialogues sustained at such a height of dignity, force, or eloquence, that he incorporated them into his work with essentially minor changes. Holinshed furnished only the bare outlines of movement for " Richard II." and "Richard III.," but Plutarch supplied traits, hints, suggestions, phrases, and actions so complete in themselves that the poet needed to do little but turn upon the biographer's prose his vitalizing and organizing imagination. The difference between the prose biographer. and the

Sir Thomas North's English version of "The Lives of the Noble Grecians, compared together by that grave learned philosopher and historiographer Plutarke, of Chæronea, translated out of Greek into French by James Amyot, Abbot of Belloxane, Bishop of Auxerre, one of the King's Privy Council, and great Amner of France, and now out of French into