y significant detail. So with the nurse in
_Romeo and Juliet_, whose endless gossip and vulgarity cannot quite hide a
kind heart. She is simply the reflection of some forgotten nurse with whom
Shakespeare had talked by the wayside.

Not only the gossip but also the dreams, the unconscious poetry that sleeps
in the heart of the common people, appeal tremendously to Shakespeare's
imagination and are reflected in his greatest plays. Othello tries to tell
a curt soldier's story of his love; but the account is like a bit of
Mandeville's famous travels, teeming with the fancies that filled men's
heads when the great round world was first brought to their attention by
daring explorers. Here is a bit of folklore, touched by Shakespeare's
exquisite fancy, which shows what one boy listened to before the fire at
Halloween:

She comes
In shape no bigger than an agate-stone
On the fore-finger of an alderman,
Drawn with a team of little atomies
Athwart men's noses as they lie asleep;
Her waggon-spokes made of long spinners' legs,
The cover of the wings of grasshoppers,
The traces of the smallest spider's web,
The collars of the moonshine's watery beams,
Her whip of cricket's bone, the lash of film,
Her waggoner a small grey-coated gnat,
* * * * *
Her chariot is an empty hazel nut
Made by the joiner squirrel, or old grub,
Time out o' mind the fairies' coachmakers.
And in this state she gallops night by night
Through lovers' brains, and then they dream of love;
* * * * *
O'er lawyers' fingers, who straight dream on fees,
O'er ladies' lips, who straight on kisses dream.[146]

So with Shakespeare's education at the hands of Nature, which came from
keeping his heart as well as his eyes wide open to the beauty of the world.
He speaks of a horse, and we know the fine points of a thoroughbred; he
mentions the duke's hounds, and we hear them clamoring on a fox trail,
their voices matched like bells in the frosty air; he stops for an instant
in the sweep of a tragedy to note a flower, a star, a moonlit bank, a
hilltop touched by the sunrise, and instantly we know what our own hearts
felt but could not quite express when we saw the same thing. Because he
notes and remembers every significant thing in the changing panorama of
earth and sky, no other writer has ever approa