e mingling of the natural and
the supernatural we here find no gap, no break; nothing disjointed or
abrupt; the two being drawn into each other so harmoniously, and so
knit together by mutual participations, that they seem strictly
continuous, with no distinguishable line to mark where they meet and
join. It is as if the gulf which apparently separates the two worlds
had been abolished, leaving nothing to prevent a free circulation and
intercourse between them.

* * * * *

Prospero, standing in the centre of the whole, acts as kind of
subordinate Providence, reconciling the diverse elements to himself
and in himself to one another. Though armed with supernatural might,
so that the winds and waves obey him, his magical and mysterious
powers are tied to truth and right: his "high charms work" to none but
just and beneficent ends; and whatever might be repulsive in the
magician is softened and made attractive by the virtues of the man and
the feelings of the father: Ariel links him with the world above us,
Caliban with the world beneath us, and Miranda--"thee, my dear one,
thee my daughter"--with the world around and within us. And the mind
acquiesces freely in the miracles ascribed to him; his thoughts and
aims being so at one with Nature's inward harmonies, that we cannot
tell whether he shapes her movements or merely falls in with them;
that is, whether his art stands in submission or command. His sorcery
indeed is the sorcery of knowledge, his magic the magic of virtue. For
what so marvellous as the inward, vital necromancy of good which
transmutes the wrongs that are done him into motives of beneficence,
and is so far from being hurt by the powers of Evil, that it turns
their assaults into new sources of strength against them? And with
what a smooth tranquillity of spirit he everywhere speaks and acts! as
if the discipline of adversity had but served

"to elevate the will,
And lead him on to that transcendent rest
Where every passion doth the sway attest
Of Reason seated on her sovereign hill."

Shakespeare and Bacon, the Prince of poets and the Prince of
philosophers, wrought out their mighty works side by side, and nearly
at the same time, though without any express recognition of each
other. And why may we not regard Prospero as prognosticating in a
poetical form those vast triumphs of man's rational spirit which the
philosopher foresaw and p