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Pros. Let them be hunted soundly. At this hour Lie at my mercy all mine enemies :

Shortly shall all my labours end, and thou

Shalt have the air at freedom: for a little

Follow, and do me service.

[Exeunt.

ACT V.

SCENE I. Before the Cell of PROSPERO.

Enter PROSPERO in his magic robes, and ARIEL.

Pros. Now does my project gather to a head: My charms crack not; my spirits obey; and Time Goes upright with his carriage.1 How's the day? Ari. On the sixth hour; at which time, my lord, You said our work should cease.

I did say so,

Pros.
When first I raised the tempest. Say, my spirit,
How fares the King and's followers?

Ari.

Confined together

In the same fashion as you gave in charge,

Just as you left them; all are prisoners, sir,

In the line-grove which weather-fends your cell ;2
They cannot budge till your release.3 The King,
His brother, and yours, abide all three distracted;
And the remainder mourning over them,

1 Time does not break down or bend under its load, or what it carries; that is, "we have time enough for what we have undertaken to do."

2 "Which defends your cell against the weather, or the storm."

3 "Till you release them," of course. The objective genitive, as it is called, where present usage admits only of the subjective genitive. The Poet has many such constructions. See page 77, note I.

"

SCENE I.

THE TEMPEST.

IBRARY

93

UNIVERSITY OF

CALIFORNIA.

Brimful of sorrow and dismay; but chiefly

He that you term'd The good old lord, Gonzalo :
His tears run down his beard, like winter-drops

From eaves of reeds. Your charm so strongly works 'em,
That, if you now beheld them, your affections

Would become tender.

Pros.

Dost thou think so, spirit?

Ari. Mine would, sir, were I human.
Pros.

And mine shall.

Hast thou, which art but air, a touch, a feeling

Of their afflictions, and shall not myself,

One of their kind, that relish all as sharply

Passion as they,4 be kindlier moved than thou art?
Though with their high wrongs I am struck to th' quick,
Yet, with my nobler reason, 'gainst my fury

Do I take part: the rarer action is

In virtue than in vengeance: they being penitent,
The sole drift of my purpose doth extend
Not a frown further. Go release them, Ariel:
My charms I'll break, their senses I'll restore,
And they shall be themselves.

Ari.

I'll fetch them, sir.

[Exit.

Pros. Ye elves of hills, brooks, standing lakes, and groves ;5
And ye that on the sands with printless foot
Do chase the ebbing Neptune, and do fly him
When he comes back; you demi-puppets that
By moonshine do the green-sour ringlets 6 make,

4. All is here used adverbially, in the sense of quite; and passion is the object of relish, and has the sense of suffering. The sense of the passage is sometimes defeated by setting a comma after sharply.

5 This speech is in some measure borrowed from Medea's, in Ovid; the expressions are, many of them, in the old translation by Golding. But the exquisite fairy imagery is Shakespeare's own.

6 These ringlets were circles of bright-green grass, supposed to be produced by the footsteps of fairies dancing in a ring. The origin of them is

Whereof the ewe not bites; and you whose pastime
Is to make midnight mushrooms; that rejoice
To hear the solemn curfew ;7 by whose aid
Weak masters though ye be—I have bedimm'd
The noontide Sun, call'd forth the mutinous winds,
And 'twixt the green sea and the azure vault
Set roaring war to the dread-rattling thunder
Have I given fire, and rifted Jove's stout oak
With his own bolt: the strong-based promontory
Have I made shake, and by the spurs 9 pluck'd up
The pine and cedar: graves at my command
Have waked their sleepers, oped, and let 'em forth
By my so potent art. But this rough magic

I here abjure; and, when I have required
Some heavenly music, which even now I do, —
To work mine end upon their senses that

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This airy charm is for, I'll break my staff,
Bury it certain fathoms in the earth,
And deeper than did ever plummet sound
I'll drown my book.

[Solemn music.

Re-enter ARIEL: after him, ALONSO, with a frantic gesture, attended by GONZALO; SEBASTIAN and ANTONIO in like manner, attended by ADRIAN and FRANCISCO: they all enter the circle which PROSPERO had made, and there stand charmed; which PROSPERO observing, speaks.

A solemn air, as the best comforter

still, I believe, a mystery. Alluded to in A Midsummer-Night's Dream, ii. 1. Mushrooms were also thought to be the work of fairies; probably from their growing in rings, and springing up with such magical quickness.

7 They rejoice, because "the curfew tolls the knell of parting day," and

so signals the time for the fairies to begin their nocturnal frolics.

8 Weak, if left to themselves, because they waste their force in sports and in frivolous or discordant aims; but powerful when guided by wisdom, and trained to worthy ends.

9 The spurs are the largest and the longest roots of trees.

To an unsettled fancy, cure the brains,

Now useless, boil'd 10 within the skull ! - There stand,
For you are spell-stopp'd. —

Holy Gonzalo, honourable man,

Mine eyes, even sociable to 12 the show of thine,
Fall fellowly drops. - The charm dissolves apace ;
And as the morning steals upon the night,

Melting the darkness, so their rising senses 13
Begin to chase the ignorant fumes that mantle
Their clearer reason. - O thou good Gonzalo,

My true preserver, and a loyal sir

To him thou follow'st! I will pay thy graces
Home 14 both in word and deed.

Most cruelly

Didst thou, Alonso, use me and my daughter :

Thy brother was a furtherer in the act ; —

Thou'rt pinch'd for't now, Sebastian. - Flesh and blood,

10 Boil'd for boiling; the passive form with the neuter sense: for the verb to boil is used as active, passive, or neuter, indifferently. We have boil'd just so again in The Winter's Tale, iii. 3: “Would any but these boil'd brains of nineteen and two-and-twenty hunt this weather?" - Love, madness, and melancholy are imaged by Shakespeare under the figure of boiled brains, or boiling brains, or seething brains. So in A Midsummer-Night's Dream, v. 1: "Lovers and madmen have such seething brains," &c. Also in Twelfth Night, ii. 5: “If I lose a scruple of this sport, let me be boiled to death with melancholy." Probably the expression grew from the heat or fever that was understood or supposed to agitate the brain in such cases.

11 In Shakespeare's time, holy, besides the religious sense of godly or sanctified, was also used in the moral sense of righteous or just.

12 Sociable to is the same as sympathetic with. - Fall, in the next line, is evidently a transitive verb, equivalent to let fall. The usage was common. So in ii. I, of this play: "To fall it on Gonzalo."

"

13 Senses was very often used thus of the mental faculties; as we still say of one who does not see things as they are, that he is out of his senses. The meaning of the passage may be given something thus: As morning dispels the darkness, so their returning reason begins to dispel the blinding mists or fumes that are gathered about it."

14 Home was much used as a strong intensive; meaning thoroughly, or to the utmost. See vol. vi. page 217, note 9.

You, brother mine, that entertain'd ambition,

15

Expell'd remorse and nature; who, with Sebastian,
Whose inward pinches therefore are most strong,
Would here have kill'd your King; I do forgive thee,

Unnatural though thou art. Their understanding

Begins to swell; and the approaching tide
Will shortly fill the reasonable shore,16

Ariel,

[Exit ARIEL.

That now lies foul and muddy. Not one of them
That yet looks on me, or would know me.
Fetch me the hat and rapier in my cell: :-
I will discase me,17 and myself present
As I was sometime Milan :

Thou shalt ere long be free.

quickly, spirit;

ARIEL re-enters, singing, and helps to attire PROSPERO.

Ari. Where the bee sucks, there suck I:

In a cowslip's bell I lie,

There I couch: when owls do cry,

On the bat's back I do fly

After Summer, merrily.18

Merrily, merrily shall I live now

Under the blossom that hangs on the bough.

Pros. Why, that's my dainty Ariel! I shall miss thee;

But yet thou shalt have freedom :

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- so, so, so.

15 Here, as commonly in Shakespeare, remorse is pity or tenderness of heart. Nature is put for natural affection. Often so.

16" The reasonable shore" is the shore of reason.

17 "Will put off my disguise." The Poet repeatedly uses case for clothes; also for skin. Sometime, in the next line, is formerly. Often so.

18 Ariel uses "the bat's back" as his vehicle, to pursue Summer in its progress to other regions, and thus live under continual blossoms. Such appears the most natural as well as most poetical meaning of this muchdisputed passage. In fact, however, bats do not migrate in quest of Summer, but become torpid in Winter. Was the Poet ignorant of this, or did he disregard it, thinking that such beings as Ariel were not bound to observe the rules of natural history? See Critical Notes.

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