s no bar to the child's enjoyment: but rather casts
about the whole play an aura of magnificence which, with the
assistant harmonies, doubles and redoubles the spell. A child no
more resents this because it is strange than he objects to read
in a fairytale of robbers concealed in oil-jars or of diamonds
big as a roc's egg. When will our educators see that what a child
depends on is imagination, that what he demands of life is the
wonderful, the glittering, possibility?

Now if, putting all this together and taking confidence from it,
we boldly launch a child upon "The Tempest" we shall come sooner
or later upon passages that _we_ have arrived at finding
difficult. We shall come, for example, to the Masque of Iris,
which Iris, invoking Ceres, thus opens:

Ceres, most bounteous lady, thy rich leas
Of wheat, rye, barley, vetches, oats and pease;
Thy turfy mountains, where live nibbling sheep,
And flat meads thatched with stover, them to keep:
Thy banks with pioned and twilled brims,
Which spongy April at thy hest betrims--
To make cold nymphs chaste crowns; and thy broom-groves,
Whose shadow the dismissed bachelor loves,
Being lass-lorn; thy pole-clipt vineyard;
And thy sea-marge, sterile and rocky hard,
Where thou thyself dost air--the Queen o' th' sky,
Whose watry arch and messenger am I,
Bids thee leave these....

The passage is undeniably hard for any child, even when you have
paused to explain who Ceres is, who Iris, who the Queen o' the
sky, and what Iris means by calling herself 'her watery arch and
messenger.' The grammatical structure not only stands on its head
but maintains that posture for an extravagant while. Naturally
(or rather let us say, ordinarily) it would run, 'Ceres, the
Queen o' the sky bids thee leave--thy rich leas, etc.' But, the
lines being twelve-and-a-half in number, we get no hint of there
being any grammatical subject until it bursts on us in the second
half of line eleven, while the two main verbs and the object of
one of them yet linger to be exploded in the last half-line,
'Bids thee leave these.' And this again is as nothing to the
difficulties of interpretation. 'Dismissed bachelor' may be easy;
'pole-clipt vineyard' is certainly not, at first sight. 'To make
cold nymphs chaste crowns.' What cold nymphs? You have to wait
for another fifty odd lines before being quite sure that
Shakespeare means Naiads (and 'What are Naiads?' says the child)
--'temperat