Who can—I will not say express, but dream a tenderness deeper than that? Sixteen years she had waited, and then she embraces him! It is difficult to divine Shakespeare, the man, in his plays and poems, but in this passage and one or two others resembling it he seems to be revealed. * * * * * _Pericles_.—The last act of Pericles, and especially the first scene, is Shakespeare at his highest. ‘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.’ Caliban he had tried to reclaim, had taught him speech and to name the big and lesser light, but all his pains were ‘lost, quite lost,’ and the ‘born devil’ rewarded them by an attempt on Miranda’s chastity. He is left behind, master of the island again, to take up his abode in the cell which Prospero and Miranda had inhabited, and with the added experience of Stephano’s drink, which he probably soon learned to imitate. Antonio, the usurping brother, is said to have been penitent, but his penitence was not profound. He offered no apology, and the first words he is recorded to have uttered after his guilt was discovered were a joke upon ‘the plain fish,’ Caliban. He was forgiven, and most likely once more became malignant. There is nothing to show us that the citizens of Milan were in much trouble when Prospero was deposed, or that they rejoiced when he was restored. They, doubtless, regretted Antonio, who ‘Set all hearts i’ the state To what tune pleased his ear.’