so; so give alms; Pray so; and, for the ordering your affairs, To sing them too:  when you do dance I wish you A wave o’ the sea, that you might ever do Nothing but that; move still, still so, and own No other function.  Each your doing is So singular in each particular, Crowning what you have done i’ the present deed, That all your acts are queens.

Perdita.  O Doricles!  Your praises are too large:  but that your youth, And the true blood that peeps so fairly through ’t, Do plainly give you out an unstain’d shepherd, With wisdom I might fear, my Doricles, You woo’d me the false way.

    Florizel.  I think you have
    As little skill to fear as I have purpose
    To put you to ’t.  But come; our dance, I pray.

Polix.  This is the prettiest low-born lass that ever Ran on the green-sward:  nothing she does or seems But smacks of something greater than herself,—­ Too noble for this place.

    Camil.  He tells her something
    That makes her blood look out:  Good sooth, she is
    The queen of curds and cream.

    Polix.  ’Pray you, good shepherd, what fair swain is this
    Which dances with your daughter?

Shep.  They call him Doricles; and boasts himself To have a worthy feeding:  I but have it Upon his own report, and I believe it; He looks like sooth.  He says he loves my daughter:  I think so too; for never gaz’d the Moon Upon the water, as he’ll stand, and read, As ’t were, my daughter’s eyes:  and, to be plain, I think there is not half a kiss to choose Who loves another best.

    Polix.  She dances featly.

    Shep.  So she does any thing, though I report it,
    That should be silent.”

Perdita, notwithstanding she occupies so little room in the play, fills a large space in the reader’s thoughts, almost disputing precedence with the Queen.  And her mother’s best native qualities reappear in her, sweetly modified by pastoral associations; her nature being really much the same, only it has been developed and seasoned in a different atmosphere; a nature too strong indeed to be displaced by any power of circumstances or supervenings of art, but at the same time too delicate and susceptive not to take a lively and lasting impress of them.  So that, while she has thoroughly assimilated, she nevertheless clearly indicates, the food of place and climate, insomuch that the dignities of the princely and the simplicities of the pastoral character seem striving which shall express her goodliest.  We can hardly call her a poetical being; she is rather poetry itself, and every thing lends and borrows beauty at her touch.  A playmate of the flowers, when we see her with them, we are at a loss whether they take more inspiration from her or she from them; and while she is the sweetest of poets in making nosegays, the nosegays become in her hands the richest of crowns.  If, as Schlegel somewhere remarks, the Poet is “particularly fond of showing the superiority of the innate over the acquired,” he has surely nowhere done it with finer effect than in this unfledged angel.