The barge she sat in, like a burnish'd throne Burn'd on the water; the poop was beaten gold; Purple the sails, and so perfumed, that The winds were lovesick with them; the oars were silver, Which to the time of flutes kept stroke, and made The water which they beat to follow faster As amorous of their strokes. And Antony, enthron'd in the market-place, sat alone Whistling to the air, which but for vacancy Had gone to gaze on Cleopatra too And made a gap in nature. Instead of accumulating further instances of these very modern and individual (and sometimes far-fetched) personifications, it is of more interest to see how Shakespeare used Nature, not only as background and colouring, but to act a part of her own in the play, so producing the grandest of all personifications. At the beginning of Act III. in _King Lear_, Kent asks: Who's there beside foul weather? _Gentleman_: One minded like the weather, most unquietly. _Kent_: Where's the King? _Gent_: Contending with the fretful elements. Bids the wind blow the earth into the sea, Or swell the curled waters 'bove the main, That things might change or cease; tears his white hair, Which the impetuous blasts with eyeless rage Catch in their fury and make nothing of; Strives in his little world of men to outscorn The to-and-fro conflicting wind and rain. In the stormy night on the wild heath the poor old man hears the echo of his own feelings in the elements; his daughters' ingratitude, hardness, and cruelty produce a moral disturbance like the disturbance in Nature; he breaks out: Blow, wind, and crack your cheeks. Rage! Blow! You cataracts and hurricanes, spout Till you have drench'd our steeples, drowned the cocks! You sulphurous and thought-executing fires, Vaunt couriers of oak-cleaving thunder-bolts, Singe my white head! And thou, all-shaking thunder, Strike flat the thick rotundity o' the world! Crack nature's moulds, all germens spill at once That make ungrateful man.... Rumble thy bellyful! Spit fire, spout rain! Nor rain, wind, thunder, fire are my daughters, I tax you not, you elements, with unkindness; I never gave you kingdom, call'd you children, You owe me no subscription; then, let fall Your horrible pleasure; here I stand, your slave, A poor, infirm, weak, and despis'd old man: But yet I call you servile ministers, That will with two pernicious daughters join Your high engender'd battles 'gainst a head So old and white as this. O! O! 'tis foul! How closely here animate and inanimate Nature are woven together, the reasoning with the unreasoning. The poet makes the storm, rain, thunder, and lightning live, and at the same time endues his human figures with a strength of feeling and passion which gives them kinship to the elements. In _Othello_, too, there _is_ uproar in Nature: