den ceased to be a dream to us was the
beginning of a rapid growth of knowledge concerning these invisible
countries; one by one they seemed to rise within the circle of our
expanding experience until we became aware that we were masters of a
new kind of geography. That delightful discovery was not many years
behind us, but this new knowledge had already become so much a part of
our lives that we often confused it with the knowledge of commoner
things.

That night, before we parted, our plans were completed; on the morrow,
when night came, the fire on the hearth would be unlighted, for we
should be on Prospero's island.

II

O, rejoice
Beyond a common joy; and set it down
With gold on lasting pillars: in one voyage
Did Claribel her husband find at Tunis;
And Ferdinand, her brother, found a wife
Where he himself was lost; Prospero, his dukedom,
In a poor isle; and all of us, ourselves,
Where no man was his own.

"Honest Gonzalo never spoke truer word," said the Poet, answering
Rosalind, who had been quoting the old counsellor's summing up of the
common good fortune on the island when Prospero dispelled his
enchantments and the shipwrecked company found themselves saved as by
miracle. It was our first evening on the island; one of those
memorable nights when all things seem born anew into some larger
heritage of beauty. The moon hung low over the quiet sea, sleeping now
under the spell of the summer night, as if no storm had ever vexed it.
So silent, so hushed was it that but for the soft ripple on the sand we
should have thought it calmed in eternal repose. Far off along the
horizon the stars hung motionless as the sea; overhead they shone out
of the measureless depths of space with a soft and solemn splendour.
Not a branch moved on the great trees behind us, folded now in the
universal mystery of the night. The little stretch of beach, over
whose yellow sands the song of the invisible Ariel once floated, lay in
the soft light fit for the feet of fairies, or the gentle advance and
retreat of the sea. The very air, suffused through all that vast
immensity with a mysterious light, seemed like a dream of peace.

In such a place, at such an hour, one shrinks from speech as from the
word that breaks the spell. When one is so much a part of the sublime
order of things that the universal movement of force that streams
through all things embraces and thrills him with the consciousnes