The _Tempest_ is an exercise of the imagination, a delicate pattern, woven perhaps as a spectacle for some special occasion, such as a marriage ceremony, for it adopts the procedure of some fanciful, jesting scenario from the popular Italian comedy. Here we find islands unknown, aerial spirits, earthly beings and monsters; it is full of magic and of prodigies, of shipwrecks, rescues and incantations; and the smiles of innocent love, the quips of comical creatures, variegate pleasantly its surface. We have already noted the traces of Shakespeare's tendency toward the romantic, and those echoes of the comedy of love, of Romeo and Juliet, who are not unfortunate but fortunate, when they are called Ferdinand and Miranda, with their irresistible impulse towards love and joy. But although the work has a bland tone, there are yet to be found in it characters belonging to tragedy, wicked brothers, who usurp the throne, brothers who meditate and attempt fratricide. In Caliban we find the malicious, violent brute, abounding in strength and rich in possibilities. He listens ecstatically to the soft music, with which the isle often resounds, he knows its natural secrets and is ready to place himself at the service of him who shall aid him in his desire for vengeance and shall redeem him from captivity. Henceforth Prospero has all his enemies in his power; he can do with them what he likes. But he is not on the same plane with them, a combatant among combatants: meditation, experience and science have refined him: he is penetrated with the consciousness of humanity, of its instability, its illusions, its temptations, its miseries. Where others think they see firm foothold, he is aware of change and insecurity; where others find everything clear as day, he feels the presence of mystery, of the unsolved enigma: "We are such things As dreams are made of and our little life Is rounded with a sleep." Will he punish? Finally, even his sprite Ariel, his minister of air, feels compassion for those downcast prisoners, and when asked by Prospero, does not withhold from him, that in his place he would be human. "And mine shall. Hast thou, which are but air, a touch, a feeling Of their afflictions, and shall not myself, One of their kind, which relish all as sharply, Passion as they, be kindlier moved than thou art?" The guilty are pardoned, and finally Caliban, the monstrous Caliban, is pardoned also, promising to behave himself better from that moment onward. Prospero divests himself of his magic wand, which gave him so absolute a power over his like, and while yet in his possession, caused him to incur the risk of behaving towards them in a more than human, perhaps an inhuman way.