Adapted from "The Convalescent" in Essays of Elia by Charles Lamb (1823)

To be sick is to enjoy monarchal prerogatives. Compare the silent tread, and quiet ministry, almost by the eye only, with which he is served—with the careless demeanor, the unceremonious goings in and out (slapping of doors, or leaving them open) of the very same attendants, when he is getting a little better—and you will confess, that from the bed of sickness (throne let me rather call it) to the elbow chair of convalescence, is a fall from dignity, amounting to a deposition.

How convalescence shrinks a man back to his pristine stature! Where is now the space, which he occupied so lately, in his own, in the family's eye? The scene of his regalities, his sick room, which was his presence chamber, where he lay and acted his despotic fancies—how is it reduced to a common bedroom! The trimness of the very bed has something petty and unmeaning about it. It is made every day. How unlike to that wavy, many-furrowed, oceanic surface, which it presented so short a time since, when to make it was a service not to be thought of at oftener than three or four day revolutions, when the patient was with pain and grief to be lifted for a little while out of it, to submit to the encroachments of unwelcome neatness, and decencies which his shaken frame deprecated; then to be lifted into it again, for another three or four days' respite, to flounder it out of shape again, while every fresh furrow was a historical record of some shifting posture, some uneasy turning, some seeking for a little ease; and the shrunken skin scarce told a truer story than the crumpled coverlid

Hushed are those mysterious sighs—those groans—so much more awful, while we knew not from what caverns of vast hidden suffering they proceeded. The Lernean pangs are quenched. The riddle of sickness is solved; and Philoctetes is become an ordinary personage.

Perhaps some relic of the sick man's dream of greatness survives in the still lingering visitations of the medical attendant. But how is he too changed with everything else! Can this be he--this man of news—of chat—of anecdote—of everything but physic—can this be he, who so lately came between the patient and his cruel enemy, as on some solemn embassy from Nature, erecting herself into a high mediating party? Pshaw! 'Tis some old woman.

Farewell with him all that made sickness pompous—the spell that hushed the household—the desert-like stillness, felt throughout its inmost chambers—the mute attendance—the inquiry by looks—the still softer delicacies of self-attention—the sole and single eye of distemper alonely fixed upon itself—world-thoughts excluded—the man a world unto himself—his own theatre—What a speck is he dwindled into!

In the second paragraph, Lamb uses the bed to illustrate which of the following?

PROSPERO:

1.     Ye elves of hills, brooks, standing lakes and groves,
2.     And ye that on the sands with printless foot
3.     Do chase the ebbing Neptune and do fly him
4.     When he comes back; you demi-puppets that
5.     By moonshine do the green sour ringlets make,
6.     Whereof the ewe not bites, and you whose pastime
7.     Is to make midnight mushrooms, that rejoice
8.     To hear the solemn curfew; by whose aid,
9.     Weak masters though ye be, I have bedimm'd
10.     The noontide sun, call'd forth the mutinous winds,
11.     And 'twixt the green sea and the azured vault
12.     Set roaring war: to the dread rattling thunder
13.     Have I given fire and rifted Jove's stout oak
14.     With his own bolt; the strong-based promontory
15.     Have I made shake and by the spurs pluck'd up
16.     The pine and cedar: graves at my command
17.     Have waked their sleepers, oped, and let 'em forth
18.     By my so potent art. But this rough magic
19.     I here abjure, and, when I have required
20.     Some heavenly music, which even now I do,
21.     To work mine end upon their senses that
22.     This airy charm is for, I'll break my staff,
23.     Bury it certain fathoms in the earth,
24.     And deeper than did ever plummet sound
25.     I'll drown my book.

The speech’s imagery serves to emphasize _____________.