The Monarch is at the hovel's door, but he cannot enter. Why? Because he is in that school into which his own wise REGAN, that '_counsels_' so 'well'--that _Regan_ who sat at his own council-table so long, has turned him; and it is a school in which the lessons must be learned '_by heart_,' and there is no shelter for him from its pitiless beating in this Poet's economy, till that lesson he was sent there to learn has been learned; and it was a Monarch's lesson, and at the Hovel's door he must recite it. He _will_ not enter. Why? Because the great lesson of state has entered his soul: with the sharpness of its illustration it has _pierced_ him: his spirit is dilated, and moved and kindling with its grandeur: he is thinking of 'the Many,' he has forgotten 'the One,'--the many, all whose senses have like conditions, whose affections stoop with the like wing. He will not enter, because he thinks it unregal, inhuman, mean, selfish to engross the luxury of the hovel's shelter, and the warmth of the 'precious' straw, while he knows that he has subjects still abroad with senses like his own, capable of the like misery, still exposed to its merciless cruelties. It was the tenant of the castle, it was the man in the house who said, 'Come, let's be snug and cheery here. _Shut up the door_. Let's have a fire, and a feast, and a song,--or a psalm, or a prayer, as the case may be; only let it be _within_--no matter which it is': 'Shut up your doors, my lord; 'tis a wild night,-- _My Regan counsels_ well; come out o' the storm.' But here it is the houseless man, who is thinking of his kindred,--his royal family, for whom God has made him responsible, out in this same storm unbonneted; and in the tenderness of that sympathy, in the searching delicacy of that feeling with which he scrutinizes now their case, they seem to him less able than himself to resist its elemental '_tyranny_.' For in that ideal revolution--in that exact turn of the wheel of fortune--in that experimental 'change of places,' which the Poet recommends to those who occupy the upper ones in, the social structure, as a means of a more particular and practical acquaintance with the conditions of those for whom they legislate, new views of the common natural human relations; new views of the ends of social combinations are perpetually flashing on him; for it is the fallen monarch himself, the late owner and disposer of the Common Weal, it is this strangely _philosophic_, mysteriously philosophic, king--philosophic as that Alfred who was going to succeed him--it is the king who is chosen by the Poet as the chief commentator and expounder of that new political and social doctrine which the action of this play is itself suggesting.