our true liberty, the principal retreat and solitariness,
wherein we must go alone to ourselves.... We have lived long
enough for others, live we the remainder of all life unto
ourselves.... Shake we off these violent hold-fasts which
elsewhere engage us, and estrange us from ourselves. The
greatest thing of the world is for a man to know how to be
his own. It is high time to shake off society, since we can
bring nothing to it...."

A kindred note is actually struck in the 146th Sonnet,[191] which tells
of revolt at the expenditure of inner life on the outward garniture, and
exhorts the soul to live aright:

"Then soul live thou upon thy servant's loss,
And let that live to aggravate thy store;
Buy terms divine in selling hours of dross;
Within be fed; without be rich no more:
So shalt thou feed on death that feeds on men,
And death once dead, there's no more dying then"--

an echo of much of Montaigne's discourse, herein before cited.[192]

In perfect keeping with all this movement towards peace and
contemplation, and in final keeping, too, with the deeper doctrine of
Montaigne, is the musing philosophy which lights, as with a wondrous
sunset, the play which one would fain believe the last of all. At the
end, as at the beginning, we find the poet working on a pre-existing
basis, re-making an old play; and at the end, as at the beginning, we
find him picturing, with an incomparable delicacy, new ideal types of
womanhood, who stand out with a fugitive radiance from the surroundings
of mere humanity; but over all alike, in the TEMPEST, there is the
fusing spell of philosophic reverie. Years before, in HAMLET, he had
dramatically caught the force of Montaigne's frequent thought that
daylight life might be taken as a nightmare, and the dream life as the
real. It was the kind of thought to recur to the dramatist above all
men, even were it not pressed upon him by the essayist's reiterations:

"Those which have compared our life unto a dream, have
happily had more reason so to do than they were aware. When
we dream, our soul liveth, worketh, and exerciseth all her
faculties, even and as much as when it waketh.... We wake
sleeping, and sleep waking. In my sleep I see not so clear,
yet can I never find my waking clear enough, or without
dimness.... Why make we not a doubt whether our thinking
and our working be another dreaming, and our waking some
kind of sleeping?"[