in the clear
   Amorous silence of the Swooning-sphere,

what shall I say of thanksgiving before the final feast of Shakespeare?

The grace must surely be short enough if it would at all be gracious.  Even were Shakespeare’s self alive again, or he now but fifteen years since gone home to Shakespeare, {220} of whom Charles Lamb said well that none could have written his book about Shakespeare but either himself alone or else he of whom the book was written, yet could we not hope that either would have any new thing to tell us of the Tempest, the Winter’s Tale, and Cymbeline.  And for ourselves, what else could we do but only ring changes on the word beautiful as Celia on the word wonderful in her laughing litany of love? or what better or what more can we do than in the deepest and most heartfelt sense of an old conventional phrase, thank God and Shakespeare? for how to praise either for such a gift of gifts we know not, knowing only and surely that none will know for ever.

True or false, and it would now seem something less than likely to be true, the fancy which assumed the last lines spoken by Prospero to be likewise the last words of the last completed work of Shakespeare was equally in either case at once natural and graceful.  There is but one figure sweeter than Miranda’s and sublimer than Prospero’s in all the range of heaven on which the passion of our eyes could rest at parting.  And from one point of view there is even a more heavenly quality perceptible in the light of this than of its two twin stars.  In no nook or corner of the island as we leave it is any savour left or any memory lingering of any inexpiable evil.  Alonzo is absolved; even Antonio and Sebastian have made no such ineffaceable mark on it by the presence of their pardoned crimes as is made by those which cost the life of Mamillius and the labours of Imogen.  Poor Caliban is left in such comfort as may be allowed him by divine grace in the favourable aspect of Setebos; and his comrades go by us “reeling ripe” and “gilded” not by “grand liquor” only but also by the summer lightning of men’s laughter:  blown softly out of our sight, with a sound and a gust of music, by the breath of the song of Ariel.

The wild wind of the Winter’s Tale at its opening would seem to blow us back into a wintrier world indeed.  And to the very end I must confess that I have in me so much of the spirit of Rachel weeping in Ramah as will not be comforted because Mamillius is not.  It is well for those whose hearts are light enough, to take perfect comfort even in the substitution of his sister Perdita for the boy who died of “thoughts high for one so tender.”  Even the beautiful suggestion that Shakespeare as he wrote had in mind his own dead little son still fresh and living at his heart can hardly add more than a touch of additional tenderness to our perfect and piteous delight in him.  And even in her daughter’s