and it would now seem something less than likely to be
true, the fancy which assumed the last lines spoken by Prospero to be
likewise the last words of the last completed work of Shakespeare was
equally in either case at once natural and graceful. There is but one
figure sweeter than Miranda's and sublimer than Prospero's in all the
range of heaven on which the passion of our eyes could rest at parting.
And from one point of view there is even a more heavenly quality
perceptible in the light of this than of its two twin stars. In no nook
or corner of the island as we leave it is any savour left or any memory
lingering of any inexpiable evil. Alonzo is absolved; even Antonio and
Sebastian have made no such ineffaceable mark on it by the presence of
their pardoned crimes as is made by those which cost the life of
Mamillius and the labours of Imogen. Poor Caliban is left in such
comfort as may be allowed him by divine grace in the favourable aspect of
Setebos; and his comrades go by us "reeling ripe" and "gilded" not by
"grand liquor" only but also by the summer lightning of men's laughter:
blown softly out of our sight, with a sound and a gust of music, by the
breath of the song of Ariel.

The wild wind of the _Winter's Tale_ at its opening would seem to blow us
back into a wintrier world indeed. And to the very end I must confess
that I have in me so much of the spirit of Rachel weeping in Ramah as
will not be comforted because Mamillius is not. It is well for those
whose hearts are light enough, to take perfect comfort even in the
substitution of his sister Perdita for the boy who died of "thoughts high
for one so tender." Even the beautiful suggestion that Shakespeare as he
wrote had in mind his own dead little son still fresh and living at his
heart can hardly add more than a touch of additional tenderness to our
perfect and piteous delight in him. And even in her daughter's embrace
it seems hard if his mother should have utterly forgotten the little
voice that had only time to tell her just eight words of that ghost story
which neither she nor we were ever to hear ended. Any one but
Shakespeare would have sought to make pathetic profit out of the child by
the easy means of showing him if but once again as changed and stricken
to the death for want of his mother and fear for her and hunger and
thirst at his little high heart for the sight and touch of her:
Shakespeare only could find a better way, a subtler a