lean her ear
In many a secret place
Where rivulets dance their wayward round,
And beauty born of murmuring sound
Shall pass into her face."

Yet, for all this, Miranda not a whit the less touches us as a
creature of flesh and blood,

"A being breathing thoughtful breath,
A traveller between life and death."

Nay, rather she seems all the more so, inasmuch as the character thus
coheres with the circumstances, the virtues and poetries of the place
being expressed in her visibly; and she would be far less real to our
feelings, were not the wonders of her whereabout thus vitally
incorporated with her innate and original attributes.

It is observable that Miranda does not perceive the working of her
father's art upon herself. For, when he casts a spell of drowsiness
over her, so that she cannot choose but sleep, on being awaked by him
she tells him, "The strangeness of your story put heaviness in me." So
his art conceals itself in its very potency of operation; and seems
the more like nature for being preternatural. It is another noteworthy
point, that while he is telling his strange tale he thinks she is not
listening attentively to his speech, partly because he is not
attending to it himself, his thoughts being busy with the approaching
crisis of his fortune, and drawn away to the other matters which he
has in hand, and partly because in her trance of wonder at what he is
relating she seems abstracted and self-withdrawn from the matter of
his discourse. His own absent-mindedness on this occasion is aptly and
artfully indicated by his broken and disjointed manner of speech. That
his tongue and thought are not beating time together appears in that
the latter end of his sentences keeps forgetting the beginning.

These are among the fine strokes and delicate touches whereby the Poet
makes, or rather permits, the character of his persons to transpire so
quietly as not to excite special notice at the time. That Miranda
should be so rapt at her father's tale as to seem absent and
wandering, is a charming instance in point. For indeed to her the
supernatural stands in the place of Nature; and nothing is so strange
and wonderful as what actually passes in the life and heart of man:
miracles have been her daily food, her father being the greatest
miracle of all; which must needs make the common events and passions
and perturbations of the world seem to her miraculous. All which is
wrought out by