38 SOME REMARKS ON THE PHILOSOPHY AND 



In the second scene Prospero and Miranda are introduced. The 

 dignified prince and subtle scholar bows himself to the tender fears 

 and inquiries of his daughter, listens to her fond humanity, quiets 

 her apprehensions for st the brave vessel who had, no doubt, some 

 noble creatures in her," and, " the time being come," prepares her 

 for those events which are advent by the discovery of their " birth 

 and lineage," his former life, his sufferings, his bereavements. 

 How tenderly Prospero attaches his child to his nature by the reci- 

 tal of his history, the idolatry of his heart, for her whose innocent 

 smile infused a fortitude from heaven ! " Plucking his magic 

 garments from him," figuratively, putting off formality, abstraction, 

 all thought but of his Miranda, at once the father, unscholared, 

 free, and unconstrained, to meet the simple unmasked nature of his 

 child. He associates his relation with her early remembrances. 



" Prospero. — Can'st thou remember 

 A time before we came unto this cell ? 

 I do not think thou can'st ; for then thou wast not 

 Out three years old. 



Miranda. — Certainly, Sir, I can. 



Prospero. — By what ? by any other house, or person ? 

 Of any thing, the image tell me, that 

 Hath kept with thy remembrance. 



Miranda. — 'Tis far off: 

 And rather like a dream than an assurance 

 That my remembrance warrants," &c. 



How beautiful is this filmy memory of childhood — how true to 

 nature ! t ? 'Tis far of." To youth, the recollections of childhood 

 are indistinct ; the mind is prospective, hopeful, changeful ; but in 

 old age, in second childhood, the mind retrospects, hope fades into 

 memory, and then, looking " into the dark backward abysm of 

 time," the prattle of infancy returns, early associations recur, and 

 what in youth is a dream, becomes an assurance. This passage in- 

 volves some most important physiological truths, as the physical 

 changes of septennial periods. It is an extraordinary fact, and well 

 known to professional men, that a blow on the head, or cerebral dis- 

 turbance, may be followed not only by the imbecility of age, but by 

 its peculiar mental changes, particularly in the recal of early associa- 

 tions and events, with the loss of all those intermediate. The in- 

 stance of the Welsh woman in St. Thomas's Hospital, who, after 

 such an accident, not only recalled her native tongue, which she had 

 not spoken for twenty years, but totally forgot every word of her 

 accustomed English, is well known in the profession. 



