193]

"Let me think of building castles in Spain, my imagination
will forge me commodities and afford means and delights
wherewith my mind is really tickled and essentially gladded.
How often do we pester our spirits with anger or sadness by
such shadows, and entangle ourselves into fantastical
passions which alter both our mind and body?... Enquire of
yourself, where is the object of this alteration? Is there
anything but us in nature, except subsisting nullity? over
whom it hath any power?... Aristodemus, king of the
Messenians, killed himself upon a conceit he took of some
ill presage by I know not what howling of dogs.... It is the
right way to prize one's life at the right worth of it, to
forego it for a dream."[194]

" ... Our reasons do often anticipate the effect and have
the extension of their jurisdiction so infinite, that they
judge and exercise themselves in inanity, and to a not
being. Besides the flexibility of our invention, to frame
reasons unto all manner of dreams; our imagination is
likewise found easy to receive impressions from falsehood,
by very frivolous appearances."[195]

Again and again does the essayist return to this note of mysticism, so
distinct from the daylight practicality of his normal utterance. And it
was surely with these musings in his mind that the poet makes Prospero
pronounce upon the phantasmagoria that the spirits have performed at his
behest. We know, indeed, that the speech proceeds upon a reminiscence of
four lines in the Earl of Stirling's DARIUS (1604), lines in themselves
very tolerable, alike in cadence and sonority, but destined to be
remembered by reason of the way in which the master, casting them into
his all-transmuting alembic, has remade them in the fine gold of his
subtler measure. The Earl's lines run:

"Let greatness of her glassy scepters vaunt;
Not scepters, no, but reeds, soon bruised, soon broken;
And let this worldly pomp our wits enchant;
All fades, and scarcely leaves behind a token.
Those golden palaces, those gorgeous halls,
With furniture superfluously fair;
Those stately courts, those sky-encountering walls,
Evanish all like vapours in the air."

The sonorities of the rhymed verse seem to have vibrated in the poet's
brain amid the memories of the prose which had suggested to him so much;
and the verse and prose alike are raised to an immortal movement in the
great lines of Prosp