“The hour’s now come;
  The very minute bids thee ope thine ear. 
  Obey and be attentive.”

The effort she calls upon her memory to make to recover the traces of her earliest impressions of life,—­the strangeness of the events unfolded to her,—­the duration of the recital itself, which is considerable,—­and, above all, the poignant personal interest of its details, are quite sufficient to account for the sudden utter prostration of her overstrained faculties and feelings, and the profound sleep that falls on the young girl.  Perhaps Shakspeare knew this, though his commentators, old and new, seem not to have done so; and without a professed faith, such as some of us moderns indulge in, in the mysteries of magnetism, perhaps he believed enough in the magnetic force of the superior physical as well as mental power of Prospero’s nature over the nervous, sensitive, irritable female organization of his child to account for the “I know thou canst not choose” with which he concludes his observation on her drowsiness, and his desire that she will not resist it.  The magic gown may, indeed, have been powerful,—­but hardly more so, we think, than the nervous exhaustion which, combined with the authoritative will and eyes of her lord and father, bowed down the child’s drooping eyelids in profoundest sleep.

The strangest of all Mr. Collier’s comments upon this passage, however, is that where he represents Miranda as, up to a certain point of her father’s story, remaining “standing eagerly listening by his side.”  This is not only gratuitous, but absolutely contrary to Shakspeare’s text,—­a greater authority, I presume, than even that of the annotated folio.  Prospero’s words to his daughter, when first he begins the recital of their sea-sorrow, are,—­

  “Sit down! 
  For thou must now know further.”

Does Mr. Collier’s folio reject this reading of the first line? or does he suppose that Miranda remained standing, in spite of her father’s command?  Moreover, when he interrupts his story with the words, “Now I arise,” he adds, to his daughter, “Sit still,” which clearly indicates both that she was seated and that she was about to rise (naturally enough) when her father did.  We say, “Sit down,” to a person who is standing; and, “Sit still,” to a person seated who is about to rise; and in all these minute particulars, the simple text of Shakspeare, if attentively followed, gives every necessary indication of his intention with regard to the attitudes and movements of the persons on the stage in this scene; and the highly commended stage-directions of the folio are here, therefore, perfectly superfluous.

The next alteration in the received text is a decided improvement.  In speaking of the royal fleet dispersed by the tempest, Ariel says,—­

  “They all have met again,
  And are upon the Mediterranean flote
  Bound sadly home for Naples";—­