we realise something of the unseen influences that control and guide our mortal lives, shaping to a perfect issue our rough-hewn designs.

In this play, as in so many other cases, Shakespeare explains his own position. When Hermia and Helena and their respective lovers have fully described all they can remember of the wondrous night spent in the wood, Hippolyta and Theseus discuss together the marvels they have heard.

Theseus is incredulous and declares

that

"The lunatic, the lover and the poet Are of imagination all compact;

One sees more devils that vast hell can hold,

That is, the madman: the lover, all as frantic,

Sees Helen's beauty in a brow of Egypt;

The poet's eye in a fine frenzy rolling, Doth glance from heaven to earth, from earth to heaven,

And as imagination bodies forth

The forms of things unknown, the poet's pen

Turns them to shapes, and gives to airy nothing

A local habitation and a name.

Such tricks hath strong imagination," &c.

Hippolyta replies:

"But all the story of the night told over, And all their minds transfigured so together

More witnesseth than fancy's images, And grows to something of great constancy."-(V., 1.).

And she is right; for it is the "sweet

reasonableness" of "The Dream" that appeals to us most strongly.

The harmony is so perfect between the poet's graceful fancies and the sights and sounds of Nature in her softest aspect, that uncompromising disbelief in it all would carry us further from the inner truth of things than even child-like credulity.

Who, even if he have not himself suffered from the poison, does not know the effect of Cupid's magic flower, making maidens see a Hyperion where we behold a Satyr, or a youth read the smile of an angel in the wanton grimaces of a Circe. Who has not longed for the power of Oberon to anoint their eyes with the Dian's bud of reason, knowing too

well that human interference will only intensify the poison?

We know, too, that the boasted speed of Puck was no ignorant fancy, but a prophetic intuition grounded on knowledge as thorough as was then attainable.

It may indeed be doubted whether any embodiment of imagination, or even of faith, can be of real and lasting value to humanity, unless the ladder of reason and knowledge has first been laboriously scaled to the topmost round, and the flight of thought continued from that lofty height. The intuitions and inventions of an untaught genius may be interesting as a study, but they could never evoke a response from every shade of human character, and from every nationality as Shakespeare's words have done.

A still more perfect example of imagination continued along the lines of knowledge and reason is to be found in "The Tempest," to which we now turn as a final example of the Supernatural in the Shakespeare plays. There is a certain

resemblance between the earlier and later Fairy Dramas, but Shakespeare had to study much, think much, suffer much before the fairy King Oberon and his merry henchman Puck could be developed into Prospero, the lord of Nature, and Ariel his faithful slave.