the winds abroad which brought Milan and Naples within his
hand; at his bidding the isle was full of sounds; Ariel served him with
tireless devotion; he read the sweet thought that flashed from Miranda
to Ferdinand; he unearthed the base conspiracy of Caliban, Trinculo,
and Stephano; he read the treacherous hearts of Antonio and Sebastian;
in his hand all these threads were gathered, and upon all these lives
his will was imposed. In that majestic drama of human character and
action, powers of air and earth, the highest and the lowest alike
serving, it is a lofty soul and a noble mind possessed by a great
purpose, which control and triumph. The magical arts are simply the
means by which a great end is served; when the work is accomplished,
the staff will be broken and the book sunk beneath the sea, lower than
any sounding of plummet."

"Yes," said Rosalind impulsively, carrying the thought another step
forward, "Prospero deals with natural, substantial things for great,
real ends, not with magical powers for fantastic purposes. When it
falls in his way, he evokes forces so unusual that they seem
supernatural to those who do not understand his power, but the end
which lies before him is always real, enduring, and noble; something
which belongs to the eternal order of things."

"For that matter," I interrupted, "it grows more and more difficult to
distinguish between the forces and the achievements that we have
thought real and possible, and those which have seemed only dreams and
visions. Men are doing things every day by mechanical agencies which
the most famous of the old magicians failed to accomplish. The visions
of great minds are realities discovered a little in advance of their
universal recognition."

"As I was saying," continued the Poet, "most men hold Prospero to be a
mere wonder-worker, a magician who puts his arts on and off with his
robe; they do not know that he stands for the greatest force in the
world. For the Imagination is not only the inspiring leader of men in
their strange journey through life, but their nearest, most constant,
and most practical helper and sustainer. That our souls would have
starved without the Imagination we are all, I think, agreed; without
Imagination we should have seen and remembered nothing on our long
journey but the path at our feet. The heavens above us, the great,
mysterious world about us, would have meant no more to us than to the
birds and the beasts that