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William Shakespeare was an English playwright, poet, and actor, widely regarded as the greatest writer in the English language. Born in Stratford-upon-Avon in 1564, he wrote 37 plays and 154 sonnets that have been performed and read in every language in the world. These words come from The Tempest, his final play, spoken by Prospero — a magician presiding over an island of illusions — as he dissolves a vision he has conjured. They are among the most quoted lines in the English language, and perhaps the most beautiful meditation on human existence ever compressed into a single sentence.

Midsummer and International Fairy Day are the year's most enchanted pairing — a day when bonfires are lit at midnight in Scandinavia, when the veil between the ordinary and the magical is said to be thinnest, when the whole natural world seems briefly lit from within. Shakespeare's line belongs here because it takes that magic seriously. We are, he says, made of dream-stuff — not solid, not permanent, but real in the only way anything is real: in the moment of its happening, before the sleep that rounds every life. Midsummer is the night to feel that most completely, before the light begins to turn.