These are among the fine strokes and delicate touches whereby the Poet makes, or rather permits, the character of his persons to transpire so quietly as not to excite special notice at the time.  That Miranda should be so rapt at her father’s tale as to seem absent and wandering, is a charming instance in point.  For indeed to her the supernatural stands in the place of Nature; and nothing is so strange and wonderful as what actually passes in the life and heart of man:  miracles have been her daily food, her father being the greatest miracle of all; which must needs make the common events and passions and perturbations of the world seem to her miraculous.  All which is wrought out by the Poet with so much art and so little appearance of art, that Franz Horn is the only critic, so far as I know, that seems to have thought of it.

I must not dismiss Miranda without remarking the sweet union of womanly dignity and childlike simplicity in her character, she not knowing or not caring to disguise the innocent movements of her heart.  This, too, is a natural result of her situation.  The instance to which I refer is when Ferdinand, his manhood all alive with her, lets her hear his soul speak; and she, weeping at what she is glad of, replies,—­

            “Hence, bashful cunning! 
    And prompt me, plain and holy innocence!—­
    I am your wife, if you will marry me;
    If not, I’ll die your maid:  to be your fellow
    You may deny me; but I’ll be your servant,
    Whether you will or no.”

Equally fine is the circumstance that her father opens to her the story of his life, and lets her into the secret of her noble birth and ancestry, at a time when she is suffering with those that she saw suffer, and when her eyes are jewelled with “drops that sacred pity hath engender’d”; as if on purpose that the ideas of rank and dignity may sweetly blend and coalesce in her mind with the sympathies of the woman.

* * * * *

In Ferdinand is portrayed one of those happy natures, such as we sometimes meet with, who are built up all the more strongly in truth and good by contact with the vices and meannesses of the world.  Courage, piety, and honour are his leading characteristics; and these virtues are so much at home in his breast, and have such an easy, natural ascendant in his conduct, that he thinks not of them, and cares only to prevent or remove the stains which affront his inward eye.  The meeting of him and Miranda is replete with magic indeed,—­a magic higher and more potent even than Prospero’s; the riches that nestle in their bosoms at once leaping forth and running together in a stream of poetry which no words of mine can describe.  So much of beauty in so few words, and those few so plain and simple,—­“O, wondrous skill and sweet wit of the man!”