ommon sense,
and floats, buoyed up by a sea, not of waters, but of poetry. Never did
Shakespeare's magnificence of diction reach more marvellous heights than
in some of the speeches of Prospero, or his lyric art a purer beauty
than in the songs of Ariel; nor is it only in these ethereal regions
that the triumph of his language asserts itself. It finds as splendid a
vent in the curses of Caliban:

All the infection that the sun sucks up
From bogs, fens, flats, on Prosper fall, and make him
By inch-meal a disease!

and in the similes of Trinculo:

Yond' same black cloud, yond' huge one, looks like a foul
bombard that would shed his liquor.

The _denouement_ itself, brought about by a preposterous piece of
machinery, and lost in a whirl of rhetoric, is hardly more than a peg
for fine writing.

O, it is monstrous, monstrous!
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 Prosper; it did bass my trespass.
Therefore my son i' th' ooze is bedded, and
I'll seek him deeper than e'er plummet sounded,
And with him there lie mudded.

And this gorgeous phantasm of a repentance from the mouth of the pale
phantom Alonzo is a fitting climax to the whole fantastic play.

A comparison naturally suggests itself, between what was perhaps the
last of Shakespeare's completed works, and that early drama which first
gave undoubted proof that his imagination had taken wings. The points of
resemblance between _The Tempest_ and _A Midsummer Night's Dream_, their
common atmosphere of romance and magic, the beautiful absurdities of
their intrigues, their studied contrasts of the grotesque with the
delicate, the ethereal with the earthly, the charm of their lyrics, the
_verve_ of their vulgar comedy--these, of course, are obvious enough;
but it is the points of difference which really make the comparison
striking. One thing, at any rate, is certain about the wood near
Athens--it is full of life. The persons that haunt it--though most of
them are hardly more than children, and some of them are fairies, and
all of them are too agreeable to be true--are nevertheless substantial
creatures, whose loves and jokes and quarrels receive our thorough
sympathy; and the air they breathe--the lords and the ladies, no less
than the mechanics and the elves--is instinct with an exquisite
g