In further explication of this peculiar people, it is to be noted that there is nothing of reflection or conscience or even of a spiritualized intelligence in their proper life:  they have all the attributes of the merely natural and sensitive soul, but no attributes of the properly rational and moral soul.  They worship the clean, the neat, the pretty, and the pleasant, whatever goes to make up the idea of purely sensuous beauty:  this is a sort of religion with them; whatever of conscience they have adheres to this:  so that herein they not unfitly represent the wholesome old notion which places cleanliness next to godliness.  Every thing that is trim, dainty, elegant, graceful, agreeable, and sweet to the senses, they delight in:  flowers, fragrances, dewdrops, and moonbeams, honey-bees, butterflies, and nightingales, dancing, play, and song,—­these are their joy; out of these they weave their highest delectation; amid these they “fleet the time carelessly,” without memory or forecast, and with no thought or aim beyond the passing pleasure of the moment.  On the other hand, they have an instinctive repugnance to whatever is foul, ugly, sluttish, awkward, ungainly, or misshapen:  they wage unrelenting war against bats, spiders, hedgehogs, spotted snakes, blindworms, long-legg’d spinners, beetles, and all such disagreeable creatures:  to “kill cankers in the musk-rosebuds,” and to “keep back the clamorous owl,” are regular parts of their business.  Their intense dislike of what is ugly and misshapen is the reason why they so much practise “the legerdemain of changelings,” stealing away finished, handsome babies, and leaving blemished and defective ones in their stead.  For the same cause they love to pester and persecute and play shrewd tricks upon decrepit old age, wise aunts, and toothless, chattering gossips, and especially such awkward “hempen home-spuns” as Bottom and his fellow-actors in the Interlude.

Thus these beings embody the ideal of the mere natural soul, or rather the purely sensuous fancy which shapes and governs the pleasing or the vexing delusions of sleep.  They lead a merry, luxurious life, given up entirely to the pleasures of happy sensation,—­a happiness that has no moral element, nothing of reason or conscience in it.  They are indeed a sort of personified dreams; and so the Poet places them in a kindly or at least harmless relation to mortals as the bringers of dreams.  Their very kingdom is located in the aromatic, flower-scented Indies, a land where mortals are supposed to live in a half-dreamy state.  From thence they come, “following darkness,” just as dreams naturally do; or, as Oberon words it, “tripping after the night’s shade, swifter than the wandering Moon.”  It is their nature to shun the daylight, though they do not fear it, and to prefer the dark, as this is their appropriate work-time; but most of all they love the dusk and the twilight, because this is the best dreaming-time, whether the dreamer be asleep or awake.  And all the shifting phantom-jugglery of dreams, all the sweet soothing witcheries, and all the teasing and tantalizing imagery of dream-land, rightly belong to their province.