that a deeper and heavier desire to sleep follows upon the
overstrained exercise of excited attention than on the weariness of a
dull and uninteresting appeal to it.

But let us consider Shakspeare's text, rather than the corrector's
additions, for a moment. Within reach of the wild wind and spray of
the tempest, though sheltered from their fury, Miranda had watched the
sinking ship struggling with the mad elements, and heard when "rose from
sea to sky the wild farewell." Amazement and pity had thrown her into a
paroxysm of grief, which is hardly allayed by her father's assurance,
that "there's no harm done." After this terrible excitement follows the
solemn exordium to her father's story,--

"The hour's now come;
The very minute bids thee ope thine ear.
Obey and be attentive."

The effort she calls upon her memory to make to recover the traces
of her earliest impressions of life,--the strangeness of the events
unfolded to her,--the duration of the recital itself, which is
considerable,--and, above all, the poignant personal interest of
its details, are quite sufficient to account for the sudden utter
prostration of her overstrained faculties and feelings, and the profound
sleep that falls on the young girl. Perhaps Shakspeare knew this, though
his commentators, old and new, seem not to have done so; and without a
professed faith, such as some of us moderns indulge in, in the mysteries
of magnetism, perhaps he believed enough in the magnetic force of the
superior physical as well as mental power of Prospero's nature over
the nervous, sensitive, irritable female organization of his child to
account for the "I know thou canst not choose" with which he concludes
his observation on her drowsiness, and his desire that she will not
resist it. The magic gown may, indeed, have been powerful,--but hardly
more so, we think, than the nervous exhaustion which, combined with
the authoritative will and eyes of her lord and father, bowed down the
child's drooping eyelids in profoundest sleep.

The strangest of all Mr. Collier's comments upon this passage, however,
is that where he represents Miranda as, up to a certain point of her
father's story, remaining "standing eagerly listening by his side." This
is not only gratuitous, but absolutely contrary to Shakspeare's text,--a
greater authority, I presume, than even that of the annotated folio.
Prospero's words to his daughter, when first he begins the recital of
their sea-so