And its tendency towards this idea is
traceable in _King Lear_, in the shape of the notion that this 'great
world' is transitory, or 'will wear out to nought' like the little world
called 'man' (IV. vi. 137), or that humanity will destroy itself.[191]
In later days, in the drama that was probably Shakespeare's last
complete work, the _Tempest_, this notion of the transitoriness of
things appears, side by side with the simpler feeling that man's life is
an illusion or dream, in some of the most famous lines he ever wrote:
Our revels now are ended. These our actors,
As I foretold you, were all spirits and
Are melted into air, into thin air:
And, like the baseless fabric of this vision,
The cloud-capp'd towers, the gorgeous palaces,
The solemn temples, the great globe itself,
Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve
And, like this insubstantial pageant faded,
Leave not a rack behind. We are such stuff
As dreams are made on, and our little life
Is rounded with a sleep.
These lines, detached from their context, are familiar to everyone; but,
in the _Tempest_, they are dramatic as well as poetical. The sudden
emergence of the thought expressed in them has a specific and most
significant cause; and as I have not seen it remarked I will point it
out.
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