Bottom and his fellow-actors in the Interlude.

Thus these beings embody the ideal of the mere natural soul, or rather
the purely sensuous fancy which shapes and governs the pleasing or the
vexing delusions of sleep. They lead a merry, luxurious life, given up
entirely to the pleasures of happy sensation,--a happiness that has no
moral element, nothing of reason or conscience in it. They are indeed
a sort of personified dreams; and so the Poet places them in a kindly
or at least harmless relation to mortals as the bringers of dreams.
Their very kingdom is located in the aromatic, flower-scented Indies,
a land where mortals are supposed to live in a half-dreamy state. From
thence they come, "following darkness," just as dreams naturally do;
or, as Oberon words it, "tripping after the night's shade, swifter
than the wandering Moon." It is their nature to shun the daylight,
though they do not fear it, and to prefer the dark, as this is their
appropriate work-time; but most of all they love the dusk and the
twilight, because this is the best dreaming-time, whether the dreamer
be asleep or awake. And all the shifting phantom-jugglery of dreams,
all the sweet soothing witcheries, and all the teasing and tantalizing
imagery of dream-land, rightly belong to their province.

It is a very noteworthy point that all their power or influence over
the hearts and actions of mortals works through the medium of dreams,
or of such fancies as are most allied to dreams. So that their whole
inner character is fashioned in harmony with their external function.
Nor is it without rare felicity that the Poet assigns to them the
dominion over the workings of sensuous and superficial love, this
being but as one of the courts of the dream-land kingdom; a region
ordered, as it were, quite apart from the proper regards of duty and
law, and where the natural soul of man moves free of moral thought and
responsibility. Accordingly we have the King of this Fairydom endowed
with the rights and powers both of the classical god of love and the
classical goddess of chastity. Oberon commands alike the secret
virtues of "Dian's bud" and of "Cupid's flower"; and he seems to use
them both unchecked by any other law than his innate love of what is
handsome and fair, and his native aversion to what is ugly and foul;
that is, he owns no restraint but as he is inwardly held to apply
either or both of them in such a way as to avoid all distortion or
perversion fr