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that it is Ariel who has raised the tempest which has flung the strangers on Prospero's island. It is he who guides the different groups to Prospero's cellfirst, Ferdinand, the King's son, who, at sight of Miranda, plunges madly in love, while she, who has never seen any man before except her father and Caliban, is stupefied with amazement at his beauty and straightway loses her heart; then the King and the courtiers, but not before the King's brother has virtually become his murderer and the King himself has repented of what he did to Prospero

Methought the billows spoke and told me of it;
The winds did sing it to me; and the thunder,
That deep and dreadful organ-pipe, pronounced
The name of Prospero-

then the drunken butler Stephano, with his bottleholder Trinculo, with whom Caliban strikes up a friendship, proposing to them a design for the murder of Prospero, which is merrily foiled by Ariel; last of all the mariners, who come up in time to complete the picture. Ariel is here and there and everywhere: he flames like lightning on the sinking ship; he pours drowsiness, when necessary, upon waking eyes; he makes music in the air; he spreads a banquet before hungry guests and snatches it away again when they are on the point of eating; he prevents the King of Naples from being murdered; and he plunges Stephano

and Trinculo up to the ears in a vile-smelling bog. He is Prospero's faithful and indefatigable servant; yet he is pining to be free; and the reward of his great services at this crisis in Prospero's fortunes is that he is to be set at liberty.

Powers almost divine are ascribed to Prospero, such as the raising of the storm and the knowledge he possesses of the designs of his adversaries. He might almost be called an embodiment of Providence-that Providence which frustrates the plots of the wicked and makes all things work together for good to the righteous. But it probably comes nearer the author's thought to say, that he is an embodiment of Wisdom, and that Ariel is Science, working to the hand of wisdom and fulfilling its designs. The supreme effort of wisdom, however, is forgiveness: Prospero says of his enemies, when they are completely in his

power:

Though with their high wrongs I am struck to the quick,

Yet, with my nobler reason, 'gainst my fury

Do I take part; the rarer action is

In virtue than in vengeance: they being penitent, The sole drift of my purpose doth extend

Not a frown further.

It is difficult not to believe that, in some places at least, Prospero is Shakspeare himself. The island, about which it is suggestively stated,

The isle is full of noises,

Sounds and sweet airs, that give delight and hurt not. Sometimes a thousand twangling instruments

Will hum about mine ears; and sometimes voices,
That, if I then had waked after long sleep,

Will make me sleep again; and then in dreaming
The clouds, methought, would open, and show riches
Ready to drop upon me; that, when I waked,
I cried to dream again—

this island must surely be the enchanted realm of poesy; and Ariel is the spirit of poetry, able to raise and still the tempest, to curb sensuality, to terrify guilt, to bring lovers together and to reward honest labour. The different groups formed from the ship-wrecked crew are an epitome of the different sections of mankind or of the characters to be found in the poet's works, while the spirits with which the air is thronged are an intimation that in the poet's world, as in heaven and earth there are more things than are dreamed of in the ordinary man's philosophy. Ariel's passionate desire to be free, in spite of his attachment to his master, to whom he has rendered so long and splendid service, is a hint of the strain implied in poetic production and of the longing for release from the business of the theatre. It sounds like a plain intimation of the poet's resolution to retire from active life when Prospero says, towards the end of the play:

I here abjure

This rough magic

I'll break my staff,

Bury it certain fathoms in the earth,

And deeper than did ever plummet sound
I'll drown my book.

And, when, still later, he intimates that he will retire to Milan, where every third thought will be his grave, the reference to the poet's own retiral can hardly be mistaken.

The Tempest is like a great piece of music, capable of expressing many meanings; and there is one thought still, behind, which is the profoundest of all. If this island, in the atmosphere of which musical sounds floated and magical forces worked, represented the realm of poetry, and especially represented the stage —that is, the little world on the surface of which the poet's genius displayed the passions and the principles which govern the great world-then the dropping of the curtain and the vanishing of the scene might easily suggest the final catastrophe of the world itself. This thought is not foreign to Shakspeare's other writings, but it is expressed in The Tempest in lines as grand as any he ever penned, occurring at the close of a tableau of classical divinities, presented as a play within the play:

These our actors,

As I foretold you, were all spirits, and
Are melted into air, into thin air,

And, like the baseless fabric of this vision,
The cloud-capped-towers, the gorgeous palaces,
The solemn temples, the great globe itself,
Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve,
And, like this insubstantial pageant, faded,
Leave not a rack behind. We are such stuff
As dreams are made on; and our little life
Is rounded with a sleep.

In this thought, that our so solid-seeming earth is only a transient phantasm, and that the hot and stormy ambitions of men are only the tossings of an uneasy dream, there is a solemnity almost biblical. In short this passage is the echo of a hundred texts of Holy Writ; and, in order to make the truth complete, we have only to add, from the same source, the reflection, that behind these fleeting appearances there lies a reality which the mutations of time can never touch, because it is embodied in Him who is the same yesterday and today and forever.

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