life-like confusion of natures, part man, part demon, part brute, Prospero by his wonderful art and science has educated into a sort of poet. Instruction, however, has in no wise tamed, it has rather increased his radical malignity and crookedness of disposition: a slave "whom stripes may move, not kindness;" "who any print of goodness will not take;" and "on whose nature nurture can never stick;"

"his vile race,

Though he did learn, had that in 't which good natures
Could not abide to be with;"

and his chief profit of language is that "he knows how to curse" his teacher: even his poetry is made up of the fascinations of ugliness; a sort of inverted beauty; the poetry of dissonance and deformity. The dawnings of understanding in him, as in some animals and perhaps in some men, take the form of vicious propensities and vile cunning, so that he evinces his humanity chiefly by openness to its vices, and a readiness to become the fool-licker of whoever will feed his beastly appetites : the only celestial thing that he knows of, is the liquor that makes him drunk; his only god the man that gives it to him. Schlegel finely compares his mind to a dark cave, into which the light of knowledge falling neither illuminates nor warms it, but only serves to set in motion the poisonous vapours; wherein I probably need not say how numerous a kindred he seems to have in the human family. Before the instructions of Prospero, even his understanding was buried beneath his earthy grossness; for the mere understanding, disjoined from the supplementary powers of reason and conscience, has no spon

taneous activity, can only be moved to action from without, and by one in whom those supplementary powers are awake and supreme. Perhaps the hero's greatest miracle is, that he "extracts sunbeams from this cucumber," teaching him how

"To name the bigger light, and how the less,

That burn by day and night :”–

"I pitied thee,

Took pains to make thee speak, taught thee each hour
One thing or other; when thou didst not, savage,
Know thy own meaning, but wouldst gabble like
A thing most brutish, I endowed thy purposes
With words to make them known."

Of course it is only by exhausting the resources of instruction on such a being that his innate and essential deficiency can be fairly shown: we cannot see what he wants until he develope all that he has. So that Prospero's having educated him into a sort of poet, without eliciting any sparks of genuine humanity, is the best possible proof what he is. That he has not the germs of a human soul, is equally evident from what education has done, and from what it has not done for him; so that I know not whether it be more wonderful, that Prospero should have made so much, as that he should have made no more out of him. High culture might indeed develope understanding in such a being, without the aid of human feelings, but it could not develope those feelings, because nature has not planted the seeds of them there. The magical world of spirits, it is true, has cast into the dark caverns of his brain a faint reflection of a better world; yet it is only in his dreaming, when sleep has in a manner relaxed the

"muddy vesture of decay," which doth so "grossly close him in," that

"The clouds, methought, would open, and show riches

Ready to drop upon me; that, when I waked,

1 cried to dream again.”

In his waking moments all his thoughts, words, and images, though poetical in their way, seem, like his nature, to have been dug up out of the ground. It is as if human speech and understanding were given to a baboon, and the utmost power of culture brought to bear upon him; so that his poetry exemplifies at once the triumph of art over nature, and the triumph of na

ture over art.

FERDINAND AND MIRANDA.

IN Ferdinand and Miranda is concentrated whatever is sweet, noble and beautiful in human nature; all their sweetness, nobility, and beauty of nature at the first sight. centring and reposing upon each other. Their courtship is the very poetry and religion of love: so inexpressibly delicate, tender and pure, it seems a stray melody caught up and rescued from the broken bowers of Eden; is like one of those things which we dream of in the "sweet holiness of youth," or rather, which we seem to remember as a part of the heaven whence we came, but which we awake only to sigh and deplore the absence of, until, perhaps, our feelings are frozen at their marvellous source by the icy breath of a worldly life. It is very apt to remind one of the courtship of Florizell and Perdita, though more, I suspect, by contrast than by

resemblance. So like, and yet so different, it is hardly possible to say which is the best; or rather, it always seems impossible not to like that best which one read last; and we can weary of either only when the fountains of love are all buried or dried up within us. That of Florizell and Perdita unites in perfection the princely and the pastoral, the graceful dignity of the palace with the breathing freshness of the field: it is indeed perfect nature, but is something more; is made up of purity and affection, but these are coloured though not obscured by unessential elements. That of Ferdinand and Miranda is not only perfect nature, but is nothing but nature; is without a single foreign element or unessential tinge it has neither the perfume of the court, nor the fragrance of the garden, but the simple, unmixed sweetness of nature, if, indeed, I ought not rather to say, of heaven. In the one, we have the love of a prince and a shepherdess, both deeply conscious what and where they are; in the other, simply the love of two lovers, both entirely forgetting themselves and their whereabout in their simultaneous mutual inspiration. short, there is a paradisical primitiveness in the courtship of Ferdinand and Miranda, such as is probably to be found in no other representation of love ever given. It is as if the enchanted Isle were Eden, Ferdinand and Miranda, Adam and Eve. At first they look upon each other with perfect wonder, each esteeming the other something too divine for human love; to her he seems a spirit, to him she seems a goddess of the Isle; and their mutual wonder becomes mutual worship as fast as ignorance gives place to knowledge. Never, assuredly, was the perfect contentedness, the entire satisfac

In

tion of love with its object so finely represented: no sooner do they see each other, than they set up their rest, neither of them having the heart to look any further, to wish any thing better: in a word, they are to each other emphatically enough; being framed by nature in that "due and sweet proportion" wherein, saith the divine Hooker, "doth lie the reason why that kind of love which is the perfectest ground of wedlock is seldom able to yield any reason of itself." When to try her love, her father tells her,

"To the most of men this is a Caliban,

And they to him are angels;"

she can only answer,

"My affections

Are then most humble; I have no ambition
To see a goodlier man :”

and on the other side,

"My father's loss, the weakness that I feel,

The wreck of all my friends, or this man's threats,
To whom I am subdued, are but light to me,

Might I but through my prison once a day
Behold this maid."

It is hardly possible to conceive any thing more religiously disinterested than the feelings with which these innocent creatures regard each other; yet we cannot say, nor do we feel, that there is any idolatry, any excess in their love.

MIRAN.

"Alas, now, pray you,
Work not so hard: I would, the lightning had
Burnt up those logs that you are enjoined to pile !