Now if, putting all this together and taking confidence from it, we boldly launch a child upon “The Tempest” we shall come sooner or later upon passages that we have arrived at finding difficult.  We shall come, for example, to the Masque of Iris, which Iris, invoking Ceres, thus opens: 

  Ceres, most bounteous lady, thy rich leas
  Of wheat, rye, barley, vetches, oats and pease;
  Thy turfy mountains, where live nibbling sheep,
  And flat meads thatched with stover, them to keep: 
  Thy banks with pioned and twilled brims,
  Which spongy April at thy hest betrims—­
  To make cold nymphs chaste crowns; and thy broom-groves,
  Whose shadow the dismissed bachelor loves,
  Being lass-lorn; thy pole-clipt vineyard;
  And thy sea-marge, sterile and rocky hard,
  Where thou thyself dost air—­the Queen o’ th’ sky,
  Whose watry arch and messenger am I,
  Bids thee leave these....

The passage is undeniably hard for any child, even when you have paused to explain who Ceres is, who Iris, who the Queen o’ the sky, and what Iris means by calling herself ’her watery arch and messenger.’  The grammatical structure not only stands on its head but maintains that posture for an extravagant while.  Naturally (or rather let us say, ordinarily) it would run, ’Ceres, the Queen o’ the sky bids thee leave—­thy rich leas, etc.’  But, the lines being twelve-and-a-half in number, we get no hint of there being any grammatical subject until it bursts on us in the second half of line eleven, while the two main verbs and the object of one of them yet linger to be exploded in the last half-line, ‘Bids thee leave these.’  And this again is as nothing to the difficulties of interpretation.  ‘Dismissed bachelor’ may be easy; ‘pole-clipt vineyard’ is certainly not, at first sight.  ’To make cold nymphs chaste crowns.’  What cold nymphs?  You have to wait for another fifty odd lines before being quite sure that Shakespeare means Naiads (and ‘What are Naiads?’ says the child) —­’temperate nymphs’: 

  You nymphs, called Naiads, of the windring brooks,
  With your sedged crowns...

—­and if the child demand what is meant by ’pioned and twilled brims,’ you have to answer him that nobody knows.

These difficulties—­perhaps for you, certainly for the young reader or listener—­are reserved delights.  My old schoolmaster even indulges this suspicion—­’I never can persuade myself that Shakespeare would have passed high in a Civil Service Examination on one of his own plays.’  At any rate you don’t begin with these difficulties:  you don’t (or I hope you don’t) read the notes first:  since, as Bacon puts it, ’Studies teach not their own use.’

As for the child, he is not ‘grubbing for beauties’; he magnificently ignores what he cannot for the moment understand, being intent on What Is, the heart and secret of the adventure.  He is Ferdinand (I repeat) and the isle is ‘full of voices.’  If these voices were all intelligible, why then, as Browning would say, ‘the less Island it.’