Surely of all the loveliest soul outpourings this in Shakespeare's “Tempest” must, for pure, winsome charm and grace, the very soul of spirit land, if our souls are not too dead to respond, hold us in raptures.
How the responsive emotions are awakened, especially when few or none are about. One feels, like Christian, to be throwing off his pack of cares, and entering into a new world, a world of the mind and spirit, and feel translated into the beyond, yet conscious of the joy of living, to laugh, to sing, to shout, a subconscious, ecstatic state where the soul has left the body as on the wings of the wind, to hold converse and reverence with the great forces of Nature.
At all times and under every aspect we are conscious of its charms, whether to soothe or create more powerful impressions. When the elements are warring in mighty conflict, the huge, dark, cumulous clouds belch forth their torrents of rain, and roll over and over, forming and dissolving in all manner of fantastic shapes. While Boreas, blowing on his great pan pipes, swollen as if his very wind would burst, with blasts, and wails, and shrieks, and then, as if exhausted with his fury, striking a lower key, a softer, sweeter melody, with gentle sighs and moans of ineffable beauty, what charm and exaltation, with outpouring of the soul, we experience when the angry spirits of the storm are past, and sweeter, gentler spirits come tripping lightly over these yellow sands in joyous roundelay.
It is a joy to be astir in the early morning with an eager and nipping air, and watch Old Sol just striding above the bank of grey clouds, which he outlines with a pencil of crimson and burnished gold, while with mixed colours he splashes in a background of purple, flushing to palest rose, to form a royal mantle for a mighty monarch as he blushes with conscious pride to greet the new-born day. The cold, grey Northern sea awakens to his caresses, and gently dimpling and heaving, throws back kisses of shimmering sunbeams in pure wantonness and joy.
As evening deepens, we watch, emerging from a background of imponderable depth and blackness, the great luminous arch of heaven, thickly inlaid with scintillating gems, as rubies, emeralds, turquoises, while the silvery moon, like a great diamond glittering and sparkling, floods the gently heaving sea and lovely strand in liquid floods of gold and silver. The wavelets gently splashing on the beach seem to murmur a lullaby of bygone days.
How hushed and calm it all is, save when the winds are sweetly sighing and crooning. We seem to think the spirits of time passed from the just beyond are trying to speak to us in a language in which we but catch faint meanings, perhaps, not to be sad, but of joy, of hope.