And such is the conclusion which is particularly forced upon us by a consideration of the play which is in many ways most typical of Shakespeare’s later work, and the one which critics most consistently point to as containing the very essence of his final benignity—­The Tempest.  There can be no doubt that the peculiar characteristics which distinguish Cymbeline and The Winter’s Tale from the dramas of Shakespeare’s prime, are present here in a still greater degree.  In The Tempest, unreality has reached its apotheosis.  Two of the principal characters are frankly not human beings at all; and the whole action passes, through a series of impossible occurrences, in a place which can only by courtesy be said to exist.  The Enchanted Island, indeed, peopled, for a timeless moment, by this strange fantastic medley of persons and of things, has been cut adrift for ever from common sense, and floats, buoyed up by a sea, not of waters, but of poetry.  Never did Shakespeare’s magnificence of diction reach more marvellous heights than in some of the speeches of Prospero, or his lyric art a purer beauty than in the songs of Ariel; nor is it only in these ethereal regions that the triumph of his language asserts itself.  It finds as splendid a vent in the curses of Caliban: 

    All the infection that the sun sucks up
    From bogs, fens, flats, on Prosper fall, and make him
    By inch-meal a disease!

and in the similes of Trinculo: 

    Yond’ same black cloud, yond’ huge one, looks like a foul
    bombard that would shed his liquor.

The denouement itself, brought about by a preposterous piece of machinery, and lost in a whirl of rhetoric, is hardly more than a peg for fine writing.

               O, it is monstrous, monstrous! 
    Methought the billows spoke and told me of it;
    The winds did sing it to me; and the thunder,
    That deep and dreadful organ-pipe, pronounced
    The name of Prosper; it did bass my trespass. 
    Therefore my son i’ th’ ooze is bedded, and
    I’ll seek him deeper than e’er plummet sounded,
    And with him there lie mudded.

And this gorgeous phantasm of a repentance from the mouth of the pale phantom Alonzo is a fitting climax to the whole fantastic play.

A comparison naturally suggests itself, between what was perhaps the last of Shakespeare’s completed works, and that early drama which first gave undoubted proof that his imagination had taken wings.  The points of resemblance between The Tempest and A Midsummer Night’s Dream, their common atmosphere of romance and magic, the beautiful absurdities of their intrigues, their studied contrasts of the grotesque with the delicate, the ethereal with the earthly, the charm of their lyrics, the verve of their vulgar comedy—­these, of course, are obvious enough; but it is the points of difference which really make the comparison striking.  One