daffodils begin to peer" and "Lawn as white as driven snow" into one
bag, and flings it upon the dust-heap, as "two nonsensical songs" sung
by "a pickpocket." Dr. Warburton blushed to think that such "nonsense"
could be foisted on Shakespeare's text. Strange that those learned men
were unable to see, not merely that the rogue-songs are intensely human
and pointedly Shakespearean, but that they are an integral part of the
drama. They complete the revelation of the complex temperament of
Autolycus, with his passion for flowers and millinery, his hysterical
balancing between laughter and tears, his impish mendacity, his sudden
sentimentality, like the Clown's

"Not a friend, not a friend greet
My poor corpse, where my bones shall be thrown!"

It is in these subtle lyrical amalgams of humour and tenderness that the
firm hand of the creator of character reveals itself.

But it is in _The Tempest_ that Shakespeare's supremacy as a writer of
songs is most brilliantly developed. Here are seven or eight lyrics, and
among them are some of the loveliest things that any man has written.
What was ever composed more liquid, more elastic, more delicately
fairy-like than Ariel's First Song?

"Come unto these yellow sands,
And then take hands:
Curtsied when you have, and kiss'd,--
The wild waves whist."

That is, not "kissed the wild waves," as ingenious punctuators pretend,
but, parenthetically, "kissed one another,--the wild waves being silent