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"THE TEMPEST" THE SEQUEL TO "HAMLET."

BY EMILY DICKEY BEERY.

"The Tempest" is a little enchanted world where play all the forces that
are manifested in the larger creation from the lowest animalism to the
highest manhood, harmonious with his invisible environment. This world
in miniature--true to the laws of the macrocosm--begins in chaos, storm,
and stress, but finds completion in supernal air and divine peace. We
shall find by consecutive study of the dramas that the poet, in his
creative work, has ever risen from lower manifestations to higher as his
own soul soared on higher and higher wing. Prospero was his last,
greatest, and divinest thought of man in his unfolding godward.

Nature in her evolution takes no vast strides, and her supreme poet
follows her divine current of growth from the animal man to the grand
manifestation of his ideal. He understood that in man's unfolding not a
round could be missed of the "Jacob's Ladder" resting upon the earth,
but reaching into the heavens.

In this ideal world of "The Tempest," Caliban stands upon the earth
groping to attain the first step, while Prospero stands upon the summit
with his face heavenward. This typical man comes upon the stage on a
high plane of development. Long previously he had left the rank and file
of humanity to tread the ever lonely path to higher achievement,
therefore we must look below him to find, among the creations of the
poet, the incarnation which was the chrysalis for this last ideal. Here
our intuitive perception immediately descries Hamlet, that wonderful
human mystery who was the first of Shakspere's sons to enter the
precincts of the inner life and catch a glimpse of the godlike
potentialities of the human soul.

In Hamlet was the struggle of birth; in Prospero, the glory of
achievement, the fulfilment to some extent of the poet's ideal man, and
the first to realize that the power of thought is the supreme force in
the universe. Hamlet caught the first glimpse of this truth when he
said, "There's nothing good or bad but thinking makes it so." He is the
hero of spiritual birth and growth in man from the dawning of the
soul-life, through its fierce struggles to dominate the lower self and
rise into realms of clearer light and truth. The "godlike reason which
was not left in him to rust unused," in its aspiration became
illuminated by intuition and revealed to his awe-inspired gaze new
worlds