Book 2 The Land of Mockery Chapter 22

"If thou wert honorable, 
Thou would'st have told this tale for virtue, not 
For such an end thou seek'st; as base, as strange. 
Thou wrong'st a gentleman who is as far
From thy report, as thou from honor."
Cymbeline.

Summer in Shakespeare Land! Summer in the heart of England--summer in wooded Warwickshire,--a summer brilliant, warm, radiant with flowers, melodious with the songs of the heaven--aspiring larks, and the sweet, low trill of the forest-hidden nightingales. Wonderful and divine it is to hear the wild chorus of nightingales that sing beside Como in the hot languorous nights of an Italian July--wonderful to hear them maddening themselves with love and music, and almost splitting their slender throats with the bursting bubbles of burning song,--but there is something, perhaps, more dreamily enchanting still,--to hear them warbling less passionately but more plaintively, beneath the drooping leafage of those grand old trees, some of which may have stretched their branches in shadowy benediction over the sacred head of the grandest poet in the world. Why travel to Athens,--why wander among the Ionian Isles for love of the classic ground? Surely, though the clear-brained old Greeks were the founders of all noble literature, they have reached their fulminating point in the English Shakespeare,--and the Warwickshire lanes, decked simply with hawthorn and sweet-briar roses, through which Mary Arden walked leading her boy-angel by the hand, are sacred as any portion of that earth once trodden by the feet of Homer and Plato.