‘O Helicanus, strike me, honour’d sir;
Give me a gash, put me to present pain;
Lest this great sea of joys rushing upon me,
O’erbear the shores of my mortality,
And drown me with their sweetness.’
What can equal in purifying, regenerative power the fact that one human being can be so much to another? No theology, morality, or philosophy can bring a man so near to God.
Tempest.—Prospero’s pardon for those who had conspired against him proceeds from ‘our little life is rounded with a sleep.’
The Tempest is called a comedy, but it suggests a tragedy in Prospero’s return to Milan and the months or years he spent there till he died. For twelve years he had been on the island with Miranda, ‘a thrid of his own life,’ ‘that for which he lived,’ ‘the cherubin that did preserve him’ during his voyage, who raised in him
‘An undergoing stomach, to bear up
Against what should ensue.’
He hears her, smitten with Ferdinand almost in a moment, declare to him:
‘I would not wish
Any companion in the world but you,
Nor can imagination form a shape,
Besides yourself, to like of’;
and she leaves her father and goes far away to Naples with her husband.
Ariel, whom Prospero had freed from his miserable enchantment, had never ceased to thirst for liberty and returns to the winds. Dearly had Prospero loved his delicate Ariel.
‘Why, that’s my dainty Ariel! I shall miss thee;
But yet thou shalt have freedom: so, so, so.’