s of
common fellowship, how vain is all human utterance! The greatest of
poems, the sublime harmony in which all things are folded, has never
been spoken, and never will be. No lyre in any human hand will ever
make those divine chords audible. The poets hear them, know them, live
by them; but no verse contains them. So much a part of that wondrous
night were we that any speech would have seemed like a severance of
things that were one; all the deep meaning of the hour was clear to us
because we were included in it. How long we sat in that silence I do
not know; we had forgotten the world out of which we had escaped, and
the route by which we came; we knew only that an infinite sea of beauty
and wonder rippled on the beach at our feet, and that over us the
heavens were as a delicate veil, beyond which diviner loveliness seemed
waiting on the verge of birth.

It was Rosalind who spoke at last, and spoke in words which flashed the
human truth of the hour into our thoughts. On this island we had found
ourselves; so often lost, at times so long forgotten, in the busy world
that lay afar off. And then we fell a-talking of the island and of all
the kindred places where men have found homes for their souls; sweet
and fragrant retreats whence the noise of strife and toil died into a
faint murmur, or was lost in some vast silence. At Milan, Prospero
found the cares of state so irksome, the joy of "secret studies" so
alluring, that, despairing of harmonising things so alien, he took
refuge with his books, and found his "library was dukedom large
enough." But the problem was not solved by this surrender; out of the
library, as out of the dukedom, he was set adrift, homeless and
friendless, until he set foot on the island where he was to rule with
no divided sway. Here was his true home; here the spirits of the air
and the powers of the earth were his ministers; here his word seemed
part of the elemental order; he spoke and it was done, for the winds
and the sea obeyed him. And when, in the working out of destiny which
he himself directed, he returns to the dukedom from which he had been
thrust out, he is no longer the Prospero of ineffective days.
Henceforth he will rule Milan as he rules the quiet dukedom of his
books; he has become a master of life and time, and his sovereignty
will never again be disputed.

Prospero did not find the island; he created it. It was the necessity
of his life that he should fashion this