Before, milk-white, now purple with love's wound,--
And maidens call it love-in-idleness.
Fetch me that flower; the herb I show'd thee once;
The juice of it on sleeping eyelids laid,
Will make or man or woman madly dote
Upon the next live creature that it sees.
Fetch me this herb: and be thou here again,
Ere the leviathan can swim a league.

PUCK. I'll put a girdle round about the earth
In forty minutes.

_Shakespeare_.

* * * * *

REFLECTIONS ON THE TOMB OF SHAKESPEARE.

As I crossed the bridge over the Avon on my return, I paused to contemplate
the distant church in which Shakespeare lies buried, and could not but
exult in the malediction,

"Good friend, for Jesus' sake forbear,
To dig the dust enclosed here.
Blest be the man that spares these stones;
And cursed be he who moves my bones,"

which has kept his ashes undisturbed in its quiet and hallowed vaults. What
honour could his name have derived from being mingled in dusty
companionship, with the epitaphs, and escutcheons, and venal eulogiums of a