where my hogshead of wine is, or I'll turn you out of my kingdom: go to,54 carry this. Trin. And this. Steph. Ay, and this. A noise of hunters heard. Enter divers Spirits in shape of hounds, and hunt them about; PROSPERO and ARIEL setting them on. Pros. Hey, Mountain, hey! Ari. Silver! there it goes, Silver ! Pros. Fury, Fury! there, Tyrant, there! hark! hark! [CAL., STEPH., and TRIN. are driven out. Go charge my goblins that they grind their joints With dry convulsions; 55 shorten up their sinews With aged cramps; 56 and more pinch-spotted make them Than pard or cat-o'-mountain.57 Ari. Hark, they roar ! Pros. Let them be hunted soundly. At this hour Lie at my mercy all mine enemies : Shortly shall all my labours end, and thou Shalt have the air at freedom: for a little Follow, and do me service. [Exeunt. 54 Go to is a phrase occurring very often, and of varying import, sometimes of impatience, sometimes of reproof, sometimes of encouragement. Hush up, come on, be off, are among its meanings. 55 In certain fevers, the mucilage sometimes gets dried out of the joints, especially the knee-joints, so as to cause a creaking or grating sound when the patient walks. Of course the effect is very painful. 56 Agèd seems to be used here with the sense of the intensive old, as before explained. See page 68, note 86. 57 Pard was in common use for leopard, as also for panther.— Cat-o'mountain is probably the wild-cat. So in Minsheu's Spanish Dictionary: "Gato montes: A cat of mountaine, a wilde cat." This animal, however, can hardly be called spotted; it is rather striped. not confined to one species of animal. Perhaps the term was ACT V. SCENE I. Before the Cell of PROSPERO. Pros. Now does my project gather to a head: Ari. On the sixth hour; at which time, my lord, Pros. Ari. Confined together In the same fashion as you gave in charge; From eaves of reeds. Your charm so strongly works 'em, 1 Time does not break down or bend under its load, or what it carries; that is, "we have time enough for what we have undertaken to do." 2 "Which defends your cell against the weather, or the storm." 8" Till you release them," of course. The objective genitive, as it is called, where present usage admits only of the subjective genitive. The Poet has many such constructions. See page 116, note 1. That, if you now beheld them, your affections Hast thou, which art but air, a touch, a feeling Of their afflictions, and shall not myself, One of their kind, that relish all as sharply Passion as they,4 be kindlier moved than thou art? Do I take part: the rarer action is In virtue than in vengeance: they being penitent, Ari. I'll fetch them, sir. [Exit. Pros. Ye elves of hills, brooks, standing lakes, and groves ;5 And ye that on the sands with printless foot Do chase the ebbing Neptune, and do fly him When he comes back; you demi-puppets that By moonshine do the green-sour ringlets make, 4 All is here used adverbially, in the sense of quite; and passion is the object of relish, and has the sense of suffering. The sense of the passage is sometimes defeated by setting a comma after sharply. 5 This speech is in some measure borrowed from Medea's, in Ovid; the expressions are, many of them, in the old translation by Golding. But the exquisite fairy imagery is Shakespeare's own. 6 These ringlets were circles of bright-green grass, supposed to be produced by the footsteps of fairies dancing in a ring. The origin of them is still, I believe, a mystery. Alluded to in A Midsummer-Night's Dream, ii. I. · Mushrooms were also thought to be the work of fairies; probably from their growing in rings, and springing up with such magical quickness. Whereof the ewe not bites; and you whose pastime Some heavenly music, which even now I do, To work mine end upon their senses that This airy charm is for, I'll break my staff, [Solemn music. Re-enter ARIEL: after him, ALONSO, with a frantic gesture, attended by GONZALO; SEBASTIAN and ANTONIO in like manner, attended by ADRIAN and FRANCISCO: they all enter the circle which PROSPERO had made, and there stand charmed; which PROSPERO observing, speaks. 7 They rejoice, because "the curfew tolls the knell of parting day," and so signals the time for the fairies to begin their nocturnal frolics. 8 Weak, if left to themselves, because they waste their force in sports and in frivolous or discordant aims; but powerful when guided by wisdom, and trained to worthy ends. This passage has often seemed to me a strange prognostic of what human intelligence has since done in taming and mar shalling the great forces of Nature into the service of man. 9 The spurs are the largest and longest roots of trees. A solemn air, as the best comforter To an unsettled fancy, cure the brains, Now useless, boil'd 10 within the skull ! There stand, 11 Holy 11 Gonzalo, honourable man, Mine eyes, even sociable to 12 the show of thine, 13 Melting the darkness, so their rising senses To him thou follow'st! I will pay thy graces Most cruelly 10 Boil'd for boiling; the passive form with the neuter sense: for the verb to boil is used as active, passive, or neuter, indifferently. We have boil'a just so again in The Winter's Tale, iii. 3: "Would any but these boil'd brains of nineteen and two-and-twenty hunt this weather?"-Love, mad... ness, and melancholy are imaged by Shakespeare under the figure of boiled brains, or boiling brains, or seething brains. So in A Midsummer-Night's Dream, v. 1: "Lovers and madmen have such seething brains," &c. Also in Twelfth Night, ii. 5: "If I lose a scruple of this sport, let me be boiled to death with melancholy." Probably the expression grew from the heat or fever that was understood or supposed to agitate the brain in such cases. 11 In Shakespeare's time, holy, besides the religious sense of godly or sanctified, was also used in the moral sense of righteous or just. And why not? 12 Sociable to is the same as sympathetic with. - Fall, in the next line, is evidently a transitive verb, equivalent to let fall. The usage was common. So in ii. I, of this play: "To fall it on Gonzalo." 18 Senses was very often used thus of the mental faculties; as we still say of one who does not see things as they are, that he is out of his senses. The meaning of the passage may be given something thus: "As morning dispels the darkness, so their returning reason begins to dispel the blinding mists or fumes that are gathered about it." 14 Home was much used as a strong intensive; meaning thoroughly, or to the utmost. See Hamlet, page 152, note 2; and Macbeth, page 60, note 26. |