Shakespeare’s genius is specially venerable in that he makes piety and honour go hand in hand with love.  It seems to have been a fixed principle with him, if indeed it was not rather a genial instinct, that where the heart is rightly engaged, there the highest and tenderest thoughts of religion do naturally cluster and converge.  For indeed the love that looks to marriage is itself a religion:  its first impulse is to invest its object with poetry and consecration:  to be “true to the kindred points of Heaven and home,” is both its inspiration and its law.  It thus involves a sort of regeneration of the inner man, and carries in its hand the baptismal fire of a nobler and diviner life.

And so it is in this delectable instance.  In Ferdinand, as in all generous natures, “love betters what is best.”  Its first springing in his breast stirs his heavenward thoughts and aspirations into exercise:  the moment that kindles his heart towards Miranda also kindles his soul in piety to God; and he knows not how to commune in prayer with the Source of good, unless he may couple her welfare with his own, and breathe her name in his holiest service.  Thus his love and piety are kindred and coefficient forces, as indeed all true love and piety essentially are.  However thoughtless we may be of the Divine help and guardianship for ourselves, we can hardly choose but crave them for those to whom our souls are knit in the sacred dearness of household ties.  And so with this noble pair, the same power that binds them to each other in the sacraments of love also binds them both in devout allegiance to the Author of their being; whose presence is most felt by them in the sacredness of their mutual truth.

So much for the illustration here so sweetly given of the old principle, that whatsoever lies nearest a Christian’s heart, whatsoever he tenders most dearly on Earth, whatsoever draws in most intimately with the currents of his soul, that is the spontaneous subject-matter of his prayers; our purest loves thus sending us to God, as if from an instinctive feeling that unless God be sanctified in our hearts, our hearts cannot retain their proper life.

In regard to what springs up between Ferdinand and Miranda, it is to be noted that Prospero does little but furnish occasions.  He indeed thanks the quaint and delicate Ariel for the kindling touch that so quickly puts them “both in either’s power”; for it seems to him the result of a finer inspiration than his art can reach; and so he naturally attributes it to the magic of his airy minister; whereas in truth it springs from a source far deeper than the magic of either,—­a pre-established harmony which the mutual recognition now first quickens into audible music.  After seeing himself thus outdone by the Nature he has been wont to control, and having witnessed such a “fair encounter of two most rare affections,” no wonder that Prospero longs to be a man again, like other men, and gladly returns to