fancy of ancient poets peopled the forest depths, the fountain or the
ocean?--oread or dryad fleet, sea-maid, or naiad of the stream? We
cannot think of them together. Miranda is a consistent, natural, human
being. Our impression of her nymph-like beauty, her peerless grace, and
purity of soul, has a distinct and individual character. Not only is she
exquisitely lovely, being what she is, but we are made to feel that she
_could_ not possibly be otherwise than as she is portrayed. She has
never beheld one of her own sex; she has never caught from society one
imitated or artificial grace. The impulses which have come to her, in
her enchanted solitude, are of heaven and nature, not of the world and
its vanities. She has sprung up into beauty beneath the eye of her
father, the princely magician; her companions have been the rocks and
woods, the many-shaped, many-tinted clouds, and the silent stars; her
playmates the ocean billows, that stooped their foamy crests, and ran
rippling to kiss her feet. Ariel and his attendant sprites hovered over
her head, ministered duteous to her every wish, and presented before
her pageants of beauty and grandeur. The very air, made vocal by her
father's art, floated in music around her. If we can presuppose such a
situation with all its circumstances, do we not behold in the character
of Miranda not only the credible, but the natural, the necessary results
of such a situation? She retains her woman's heart, for that is
unalterable and inalienable, as a part of her being; but her deportment,
her looks, her language, her thoughts--all these, from the supernatural
and poetical circumstances around her, assume a cast of the pure ideal;
and to us, who are in the secret of her human and pitying nature,
nothing can be more charming and consistent than the effect which she
produces upon others, who never having beheld any thing resembling her,
approach her as "a wonder," as something celestial:--

Be sure! the goddess on whom these airs attend!

And again:--

What is this maid?
Is she the goddess who hath severed us,
And brought us thus together?

And Ferdinand exclaims, while gazing on her,

My spirits as in a dream are all bound up!
My father's loss, the weakness that I feel,
The wreck of all my friends, or this man's threats,
To whom I am subdued, are but light to me
Might I but through my prison once a day
Behold this maid: all corner