Ariel.  Mine would, sir, were I human.

   Prospero.  And mine shall. 
     Hast thou, which art but air, a touch, a feeling
     Of their afflictions, and shall not myself,
     One of their kind, that relish all as sharply,
     Passion’d as they, be kindlier moved than thou art?

It has been observed that there is a peculiar charm in the songs introduced in Shakespeare, which, without conveying any distinct images, seem to recall all the feelings connected with them, like snatches of half-forgotten music heard indistinctly and at intervals.  There is this effect produced by Ariel’s songs, which (as we are told) seem to sound in the air, and as if the person playing them were invisible.  We shall give one instance out of many of this general power.

Enter Ferdinend; and Ariel invisible, playing and singing.

Ariel’s Song

Come unto these yellow sands,
And then take hands;
Curt’sied when you have, and kiss’d,
(The wild waves whist;)
Foot it featly here and there;
And sweet sprites the burden bear.
[Burden dispersedly.]
Hark, hark! bowgh-wowgh:  the watch-dogs bark,

    Bowgh-wowgh.

Ariel.  Hark, hark!  I hear
The strain of strutting chanticleer
Cry cock-a-doodle-doo.

Ferdinand.  Where should this music be? in air or earth? 
It sounds no more:  and sure it waits upon
Some god o’ th’ island.  Sitting on a bank
Weeping against the king my father’s wreck,
This music crept by me upon the waters,
Allaying both their fury and my passion
With its sweet air; thence I have follow’d it,
Or it hath drawn me rather:—­but ’tis gone.—­
No, it begins again.

Ariel’s Song

Full fathom Eve thy father lies,
Of his bones are coral made: 
Those are pearls that were his eyes,
Nothing of him that doth fade,
But doth suffer a sea change,
Into something rich and strange. 
Sea-nymphs hourly ring his knell—­
Hark!  I now I hear them, ding-dong bell.
[Burden ding-dong.]

   Ferdinand.  The ditty does remember my drown’d father. 
     This is no mortal business, nor no sound
     That the earth owns:  I hear it now above me.

The courtship between Ferdinand and Miranda is one of the chief beauties of this play.  It is the very purity of love.  The pretended interference of Prospero with it heightens its interest, and is in character with the magician, whose sense of preternatural power makes him arbitrary, tetchy, and impatient of opposition.

The Tempest is a finer play than the Midsummer Night’s Dream, which has sometimes been compared with it; but it is not so fine a poem.  There are a greater number of beautiful passages in the latter.  Two of the most striking in The Tempest are spoken by Prospero.  The one is that admirable one when the vision which he has conjured up disappears, beginning, ’The cloud-capp’d towers, the gorgeous palaces,’ &c., which has so often been quoted that every schoolboy knows it by heart; the other is that which Prospero makes in abjuring his art: