him strongly.

_Mir._ Never till this day
Saw I him touch'd with anger so distemper'd.

_Pros._ You do look, my son, in a moved sort,
As if you were dismay'd: be cheerful, sir.
Our revels....

And then, after the famous lines, follow these:

Sir, I am vex'd:
Bear with my weakness; my old brain is troubled;
Be not disturb'd with my infirmity;
If you be pleased, retire into my cell
And there repose: a turn or two I'll walk,
To still my beating mind.

We seem to see here the whole mind of Shakespeare in his last years.
That which provokes in Prospero first a 'passion' of anger, and, a
moment later, that melancholy and mystical thought that the great world
must perish utterly and that man is but a dream, is the sudden
recollection of gross and apparently incurable evil in the 'monster'
whom he had tried in vain to raise and soften, and in the monster's
human confederates. It is this, which is but the repetition of his
earlier experience of treachery and ingratitude, that troubles his old
brain, makes his mind 'beat,'[192] and forces on him the sense of
unreality and evanescence in the world and the life that are haunted by
such evil. Nor, though Prospero can spare and forgive, is there any sign
to the end that he believes the evil curable either in the monster, the
'born devil,' or in the more monstrous villains, the 'worse than
devils,' whom he so sternly dismisses. But he has learned patience, has
come to regard his anger and loathing as a weakness or infirmity, and
would not have it disturb the young and innocent. And so, in the days of
_King Lear_, it was chiefly the power of 'monstrous' and apparently
cureless evil in the 'great world' that filled Shakespeare's soul with
horror, and perhaps forced him sometimes to yield to the infirmity of
misanthropy and despair, to cry 'No, no, no life,' and to take refuge in
the thought that this fitful fever is a dream that must soon fade into a
dreamless sleep; until, to free himself from the perilous stuff that
weighed upon his heart, he summoned to his aid his 'so potent art,' and
wrought this stuff into the stormy music of his greatest poem, which
seems to cry,

You heavens, give me that patience, patience I need,

and, like the _Tempest_, seems to preach to us from end to end, 'Thou
must be patient,' 'Bear free and patient thoughts.'[193]

FOOTNOTES:

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