“This swift business
    I must uneasy make, lest too light winning
    Make the prize light.”

I must note one more trait in Ariel.  It is his fondness of mischievous sport, wherein he reminds us somewhat of Fairy Puck in A Midsummer-Night’s Dream.  It is shown in the evident gust with which he relates the trick he has played on Caliban and his confederates, when they were proceeding to execute their conspiracy against the hero’s life: 

    “As I told you, sir, they were red-hot with drinking;
    So full of valour, that they smote the air
    For breathing in their faces; beat the ground
    For kissing of their feet; yet always bending
    Towards their project.  Then I beat my tabor;
    At which, like unback’d colts, they prick’d their ears,
    Advanc’d their eyelids, lifted up their noses
    As they smelt music:  so I charm’d their ears,
    That, calf-like, they my lowing follow’d through
    Tooth’d briers, sharp furzes, pricking goss, and thorns,
    Which enter’d their frail shins:  at last I left them
    I’ the filthy-mantled pool beyond your cell,
    There dancing up to th’ chins.”

Of Ariel’s powers and functions as Prospero’s prime minister, no logical forms, nothing but the Poet’s art, can give any sort of an idea.  No painter, I am sure, can do any thing with him; still less can any sculptor.  Gifted with the ubiquity and multiformity of the substance from which he is named, before we can catch and define him in any one shape, he has passed into another.  All we can say of him on this score is, that through his agency Prospero’s thoughts forthwith become things, his volitions events.  And yet, strangely and diversely as Ariel’s nature is elemented and composed, with touches akin to several orders of being, there is such a self-consistency about him, he is so cut out in individual distinctness, and so rounded-in with personal attributes, that contemplation freely and easily rests upon him as an object.  In other words, he is by no means an abstract idea personified, or any sort of intellectual diagram, but a veritable person; and we have a personal feeling towards the dear creature, and would fain knit him into the living circle of our human affections, making him a familiar playfellow of the heart, to be cherished with “praise, blame, love, kisses, tears, and smiles.”

* * * * *

If Caliban strikes us as a more wonderful creation than Ariel, it is probably because he has more in common with us, without being in any proper sense human.  Perhaps I cannot hit him off better than by saying that he represents, both in body and soul, a sort of intermediate nature between man and brute, with an infusion of something that belongs to neither; as though one of the transformations imagined by the Developmentists had stuck midway in its course, where a breath or vapour of essential Evil had knit itself