(_Winter's Tale._)

Goethe calls winds and waves lovers. In _Troilus and Cressida_ we
have:

The sea being smooth,
How many shallow bauble boats dare sail
Upon her patient breast, making their way
With those of nobler bulk!
But let the ruffian Boreas once enrage
The gentle Thetis, and anon behold
The strong-ribb'd bark through liquid mountains cut,
Bounding between two moist elements
Like Perseus' horse.

And further on in the same scene:

What raging of the sea! shaking of earth!
Commotion in the winds!
... the bounded waters
Should lift their bosoms higher than the shores.

The personification of the river in _Henry IV._ is half mythical:

When on the gentle Severn's sedgy bank
In single opposition, hand to hand,
He did confound the best part of an hour
In changing hardiment with great Glendower;
Three times they breath'd, and three times did they drink,
Upon agreement, of swift Severn's flood;
Who, then affrighted with their bloody looks,
Ran fearfully among the trembling reeds,
And hid his crisp head in the hollow bank,
Blood-stained with these valiant combatants.

Striking instances of personification from _Antony and Cleopatra_
are:

The barge she sat in, like a burnish'd throne
Burn'd on the water; the poop was beaten gold;
Purple the sails, and so perfumed, that
The winds were lovesick with them; the oars were silver,
Which to the time of flutes kept stroke, and made
The water which they beat to follow faster
As amorous of their strokes.

And Antony, enthron'd in the market-place, sat alone

Whistling to the air, which but for vacancy
Had gone to gaze on Cleopatra too
And made a gap in nature.

Instead of accumulating further instances of these very modern and
individual (and sometimes far-fetched) personifications, it is of
more interest to see how Shakespeare used Nature, not only as
background and colouring, but to act a part of her own in the play,
so producing the grandest of all personifications.

At the beginning of Act III. in _King Lear_, Kent asks:

Who's there beside foul weather?

_Gentleman_: One minded like the weather, most unquietly.

_Kent_: Where's the King?

_Gent_: Contending with the fretful elements.
Bids the wind blow the earth into the sea,
Or swell the curled waters 'bove the main,
That things might change or cease; tears his white hair,
Which the impetuous bl