And when, in the working out of destiny which
he himself directed, he returns to the dukedom from which he had been
thrust out, he is no longer the Prospero of ineffective days.
Henceforth he will rule Milan as he rules the quiet dukedom of his
books; he has become a master of life and time, and his sovereignty
will never again be disputed.
Prospero did not find the island; he created it. It was the necessity
of his life that he should fashion this bit of territory out of the
great sea, that here his soul might learn its strength and win its
freedom; that here, far from dukedom and courtiers, he might discover
that a great soul creates its own world and lives its own life. Milan
may cast him out, as did Florence another of his kind, but this human
rejection will but bring him into that empire which no enmity may
touch, in the calm of whose divinely ordered government treasons are
unknown. No man finds himself until he has created a world for his own
soul; a world apart from care and weakness and the confusions of
strife, in which the faiths that inspire him and the ideals that lead
him are the great and lasting verities. To this world-building all the
great poetic minds are driven; within this invisible empire alone can
they reconcile the life that surrounds them with the life that floats
like a dream before them.
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