ould never endure to lie buried near Shakspeare, but would rise
up at midnight and grope his way out of the church-door, rather than
sleep in the shadow of so stupendous a memory.

I should hardly have dared to add another to the innumerable
descriptions of Stratford-on-Avon, if it had not seemed to me that
this would form a fitting framework to some reminiscences of a very
remarkable woman. Her labor, while she lived, was of a nature and
purpose outwardly irreverent to the name of Shakspeare, yet, by its
actual tendency, entitling her to the distinction of being that one of
all his worshippers who sought, though she knew it not, to place the
richest and stateliest diadem upon his brow. We Americans, at least, in
the scanty annals of our literature, cannot afford to forget her high
and conscientious exercise of noble faculties, which, indeed, if you
look at the matter in one way, evolved only a miserable error, but, more
fairly considered, produced a result worth almost what it cost her. Her
faith in her own ideas was so genuine, that, erroneous as they were,
it transmuted them to gold, or, at all events, interfused a large
proportion of that precious and indestructible substance among the waste
material from which it can readily be sifted.

The only time I ever saw Miss Bacon was in London, where she had
lodgings in Spring Street, Sussex Gardens, at the house of a grocer, a
portly, middle-aged, civil, and friendly man, who, as well as his wife,
appeared to feel a personal kindness towards their lodger. I was ushered
up two (and I rather believe three) pair of stairs into a parlor
somewhat humbly furnished, and told that Miss Bacon would come soon.
There were a number of books on the table, and, looking into them, I
found that every one had some reference, more or less immediate, to her
Shakspearian theory,--a volume of Raleigh's "History of the World,"
a volume of Montaigne, a volume of Lord Bacon's letters, a volume of
Shakspeare's plays; and on another table lay a large roll of manuscript,
which I presume to have been a portion of her work. To be sure, there
was a pocket-Bible among the books, but everything else referred to the
one despotic idea that had got possession of her mind; and as it had
engrossed her whole soul as well as her intellect, I have no doubt
that she had established subtile connections between it and the Bible
likewise. As is apt to be the case with solitary students, Miss Bacon
probably read la