By my so potent art.

Passing from his power over nature to the manifestation of his higher
self with men, we see the spiritual plane he had reached. In coming
again in contact with the world of humanity his first action is the
recognition of the good and the forgiving the evil:

--O good Gonzalo,
My true preserver, and a loyal sir
To him thou follow'st, I will pay thy graces
Home both in word and deed.

His divine forgiveness of those who had so cruelly wronged him shows the
height of his spiritual attainment:

Though with their high wrongs I am struck to the quick,
Yet with my nobler reason 'gainst my fury
Do I take part; the rarer action is
In virtue than in vengeance: they being penitent,
The sole drift of my purpose doth extend
Not a frown further.

In the very remarkable events of his life he recognizes a higher power
in all his guidance. "Was Milan thrust from Milan, that his issue should
become kings of Naples?"

There's a divinity that shapes our ends,
Roughhew them how we will.

In no drama has the poet risen to such supreme types of character.
Prospero was the highest expression of Shakspere's latest thought, but
only the shadowing forth of a supremer ideal. We can portray what is
beneath us far more vividly and truly than what is above us. Shakspere
had _lived_ Hamlet, and that is why he so vitally touches every human
soul. In Prospero it was the vision by the great poetic soul of a
promised land he had only viewed from a mountain top. He had seen the
wonderfully luscious grasps of Eschol, but had not yet tasted them. This
is why we feel the vast yet subtle difference between "Hamlet" and "The
Tempest."

If the immortal poet had lived the years allotted to man, with ever
increasing openness of vision, his own soul would have attained that
lofty height where, from the "pattern on the mount," he would have
portrayed the splendor of divine manhood in godlike majesty, the soul
irradiating the body like the shining face of Moses in its halo of
awe-inspiring divinity. The people required a veil; they would require
one still.

Although Shakspere left us before he had lived in the radiance of the
truly spiritual realm, we may well crown his Prospero with his words of
another:

He sits 'mongst men like a descended God:
He hath a kind of honor sets him off,
More than a mortal seeming.

THE CREATIVE MAN.

BY STINSON JA