to burst occasionally through his torpor into bitter and violent speech?
If we are to learn anything of his mind from his last works, it is
surely this.

And such is the conclusion which is particularly forced upon us by a
consideration of the play which is in many ways most typical of
Shakespeare's later work, and the one which critics most consistently
point to as containing the very essence of his final benignity--_The
Tempest_. There can be no doubt that the peculiar characteristics which
distinguish _Cymbeline_ and _The Winter's Tale_ from the dramas of
Shakespeare's prime, are present here in a still greater degree. In _The
Tempest_, unreality has reached its apotheosis. Two of the principal
characters are frankly not human beings at all; and the whole action
passes, through a series of impossible occurrences, in a place which can
only by courtesy be said to exist. The Enchanted Island, indeed,
peopled, for a timeless moment, by this strange fantastic medley of
persons and of things, has been cut adrift for ever from common sense,
and floats, buoyed up by a sea, not of waters, but of poetry. Never did
Shakespeare's magnificence of diction reach more marvellous heights than
in some of the speeches of Prospero, or his lyric art a purer beauty
than in the songs of Ariel; nor is it only in these ethereal regions
that the triumph of his language asserts itself. It finds as splendid a
vent in the curses of Caliban:

All the infection that the sun sucks up
From bogs, fens, flats, on Prosper fall, and make him
By inch-meal a disease!

and in the similes of Trinculo: