the world around and within us.  And the mind acquiesces freely in the miracles ascribed to him; his thoughts and aims being so at one with Nature’s inward harmonies, that we cannot tell whether he shapes her movements or merely falls in with them; that is, whether his art stands in submission or command.  His sorcery indeed is the sorcery of knowledge, his magic the magic of virtue.  For what so marvellous as the inward, vital necromancy of good which transmutes the wrongs that are done him into motives of beneficence, and is so far from being hurt by the powers of Evil, that it turns their assaults into new sources of strength against them?  And with what a smooth tranquillity of spirit he everywhere speaks and acts! as if the discipline of adversity had but served

                         “to elevate the will,
    And lead him on to that transcendent rest
    Where every passion doth the sway attest
    Of Reason seated on her sovereign hill.”

Shakespeare and Bacon, the Prince of poets and the Prince of philosophers, wrought out their mighty works side by side, and nearly at the same time, though without any express recognition of each other.  And why may we not regard Prospero as prognosticating in a poetical form those vast triumphs of man’s rational spirit which the philosopher foresaw and prepared?  For it is observable that, before Prospero’s coming to the island, the powers which cleave to his thoughts and obey his “so potent art” were at perpetual war, the better being in subjection to the worse, and all being turned from their rightful ends into a mad, brawling dissonance:  but he teaches them to know their places; and, “weak masters though they be,” without such guidance, yet under his ordering they become powerful, and work together as if endowed with a rational soul and a social purpose; their insane gabble turning to speech, their savage howling to music; so that

                            “the isle is full of noises,
    Sounds, and sweet airs, that give delight, and hurt not.”

Wherein is boldly figured the educating of Nature up, so to speak, into intelligent ministries, she lending man hands because he lends her eyes, and weaving her forces into vital union with him.

                     “You 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-bas’d promontory
Have I made shake; and by the spurs pluck’d up
The pine and cedar.”