free playing of the action unchecked by the conditions of outward fact
and reality. Accordingly a sort of lawlessness is, as it ought to be,
the very law of the performance. King Oberon is the sovereign who
presides over the world of dreams; Puck is his prime minister; and all
the other denizens of Fairydom are his subjects and the agents of his
will in this capacity. Titania's nature and functions are precisely
the same which Mercutio assigns to Queen Mab, whom he aptly describes
as having for her office to deliver sleeping men's fancies of their
dreams, those "children of an idle brain." In keeping with this
central dream-idea, the actual order of things everywhere gives place
to the spontaneous issues and capricious turnings of the dreaming
mind; the lofty and the low, the beautiful and the grotesque, the
world of fancy and of fact, all the strange diversities that enter
into "such stuff as dreams are made of," running and frisking
together, and interchanging their functions and properties; so that
the whole seems confused, flitting, shadowy, and indistinct, as fading
away in the remoteness and fascination of moonlight. The very scene is
laid in a veritable dream-land, called Athens indeed, but only because
Athens was the greatest beehive of beautiful visions then known; or
rather it is laid in an ideal forest near an ideal Athens,--a forest
peopled with sportive elves and sprites and fairies feeding on
moonlight and music and fragrance; a place where Nature herself is
preternatural; where everything is idealized, even to the sunbeams and
the soil; where the vegetation proceeds by enchantment, and there is
magic in the germination of the seed and secretion of the sap.

The characteristic attributes of the fairy people are, perhaps, most
availably represented in Puck; who is apt to remind one of Ariel,
though the two have little in common, save that both are
preternatural, and therefore live no longer in the faith of reason.
Puck is no such sweet-mannered, tender-hearted, music-breathing
spirit, as Prospero's delicate prime-minister; there are no such fine
interweavings of a sensitive moral soul in his nature, he has no such
soft touches of compassion and pious awe of goodness, as link the
dainty Ariel in so smoothly with our best sympathies. Though
Goodfellow by name, his powers and aptitudes for mischief are quite
unchecked by any gentle relentings of fellow-feeling: in whatever
distresses he finds or occasions he