storm and by his sweet singing draws Ferdinand to Prospero's cell. With the aid of his "6 meaner fellows," he brings Alonso to a keen realization of his past cruelty to the banished duke, circumvents the evil designs of Antonio and Sebastian, and soundly punishes Caliban and his confederates for their treachery.

Yet with all his nimbleness of spirit and quickness of insight into his master's wishes, he is not human and longs to be free from bondage. His great debt to Prospero he acknowledges, yet he is too far removed from the emotional life of man to be deeply touched by gratitude or other human sentiment. "In air he lives, from air he derives his being, in air he acts," observes Coleridge, "and all his colors and properties seem to have been obtained from the rainbow and the skies."

No less distinct and more strikingly original is Caliban, whom Prospero employs as a servant. It has become a commonplace to speak of him as the earthy counterpart of Ariel. A savage monster, distorted in form and gross in mind, he stands midway between the animal pure and simple and human kind. With the instincts of a brute and without

the moral nature of man, he is a creature of the senses, knowing no law beyond the stimulus of his passions. Nevertheless the character of Caliban is not contemptible. "It is," says Hazlitt, “the essence of grossness, but there is not a particle of vulgarity in it. Shakespeare has described the brutal mind of Caliban in contact with the pure and original forms of nature; the character grows out of the soil where it is rooted, uncontrolled, uncouth, and wild, uncramped by any of the meannesses of custom. Vulgarity is not natural coarseness but conventional coarseness learned from others." His closeness to the earth has bred within him a vigorous imagination and a delight in the natural world,

the sounds, colors, and pleasant nooks of the islands:

"the isle is full of noises

Sounds and sweet airs that give delight and hurt not.
Sometimes a thousand twangling instruments

Will hum about my ears, and sometime voices
That, if I had then waked after long sleep,

Will make me sleep again; and then in dreaming
The clouds methought would open and show riches
Ready to drop upon me, that, when I waked

I cried to dream again."

In portraying this character Shakespeare was in

fluenced, no doubt, by the stories and writings of travellers who had recently returned from the American colonies; yet the matchless vigor and symmetry of the portrait mark its essential features as the work of the poet's imagination.

The character of Miranda is clearly drawn, though it is remarkable with what few words and how brief action. Beyond her short speeches with Prospero and Ferdinand, and the interest which she displays in the punishment of the young prince, little is given; yet this little is sufficient to enable us to understand her inmost life. Living from her earliest youth upon an island uninhabited save by herself, her father, and Caliban, the purity and innocence of her nature are her most marked characteristics. Removed from the complex routine of civilization and ignorant of the conventions of society, the qualities of her mind and heart are elemental in their simplicity. She is moved to tears by the suffering of the shipwrecked sailors:

"Had I been any god of power, I would
Have sunk the sea within the earth or ere
It should the good ship so have swallow'd
And the fraughting souls within her."

At the appearance of Ferdinand her wonder and admiration are unconcealed, and she speaks with the open directness of innocent childhood:

"I might call him

A thing divine, for nothing natural

I ever saw so noble,"

and later when the young prince has declared his love she acknowledges her affection for him with the exquisite modesty of a nature untouched by the artificial deceits and usages of social life:

"I am your wife, if you will marry me;

If not, I'll die your maid: to be your fellow
You may deny me; but I'll be your servant,
Whether you will or no."

The remaining characters of the play are more or less commonplace. Ferdinand, grown to manhood amid the surroundings of his father's court, seems to be characterized by some nobility of mind, due largely, perhaps, to his new born love for Miranda; Sebastian and Antonio are not greatly distinguished from other personalities of evil nature and weak ambition; Stephano and Trinculo are stock characters with little individuality; they are types to be found in almost every Shakespearian play, and in

no large sense affect the general movement of the drama.

As a drama The Tempest does not rank so high as some other plays; yet as the final expression of Shakespeare's imaginative power it is unapproachable. "It is," observes an appreciative critic,1 "in certain respects his masterpiece; as a poem cast in dramatic form, one of the most beautiful creations in English poetry. The profound meditativeness and rich intellectual quality of Hamlet are fused in it with the lovely fancy of A Midsummer Night's Dream, while in deep and sustained play of imagination, fashioning the play in its structure, shaping its parts to one high end, touching it everywhere with a kind of ultimate beauty, it stands alone not only in Shakespeare's work but in modern poetry."

1 H. W. Mabie, "William Shakespeare: Poet, Dramatist, and Man."