country goes too, to comfort exiles over
the sea. Man roams the world, wandering and working; but he is not
enough removed from the beasts to escape the prick in the heart that
turns the tired horse homeward, and sets the old fox padding through the
woods to die near the earth where he was whelped. Shakespeare's heart
always turned for quiet happiness to the country where he lived as a
boy. In this play, he turned not to the squires and farm-folk, but to
the country itself, and to those genii of the country, the fairies,
believed in, and often seen by country people, and reverenced by them as
the cause of mishaps. Imagination in a work of art is a transmuting of
the known by understanding. For some reason, perhaps home-sickness,
perhaps weariness of the city-jostle, that those who have lived the
country life cannot call life, or it may be, perhaps, from an exultation
in the bounty of the world to give pleasure to the mind, the country
meant very much to Shakespeare in the months during which he wrote the
last of the English plays. In writing this play, his imagination
conceived Athens as an English town, possibly Stratford, or some other
more pleasant place, with a wood, haunted by fairies, only a league
away, where the mind could be happy listening to the voice of the
beloved--

"More tuneable than lark to shepherd's ear,
When wheat is green, when hawthorn buds appear."

There was a memory of happiness about the wood. It was

"the wood, where often you and I
Upon faint primrose-beds were wont to lie,
Emptying our bosoms of their counsel sweet."

In this wood, where Theseus goes a-hunting, Shakespeare, in his fantasy,
allows the fairies to vex the life of mortals. For a little while he
fancied, or tried to fancy, that those who are made mad and blind by the
obsessions of passion are made so at the whim of powers outside life,
and that the accidents of life, bad seasons, personal deformities, etc.,
are due to something unhappy in a capricious immortal world, careless of
this world, but easily offended and appeased by mortal action.

All the earth of England is consecrated by the intense memories of the
English. In this play Shakespeare set himself free to tell his love for
the earth of England that had ministered to his mind with beauty through
the years of youth. Walking in the Cotswold country, when

"russet-pated choughs, many in sort
Rising and cawing at the gun's report,