powering pathos. Though her character has been only sketched, as if by the finger of a god, in snow, what a vast dramatic purpose it serves! Her madness is the pivot of one Act, her burial of another; her maiden beauty the inspiration of both while, over the whole tragic expanse, her image flits like the dove that followed the raven! What can be sadder than her story! But a little while ago, she was bewailing the overthrow of that noble and most sovereign reason,' and now the sweet bells of her own mind are not only jangled out of tune, but ruined, broken! One tithe of the woe that Hamlet carries, suffices to crush her. As if in rebuke of that impatient Ghost, the first attempt at revenge involves the sacrifice of this unblemished innocent. But Hamlet escapes the spectacle. By an inspired fitness of events, his banishment just precedes her madness. His self-contained lunacy could never have endured the test of her hopeless, absolute madness. The side by side contrast of real し with simulated insanity, though sustained to advantage in Lear, between a young noble and an old king, would be a ghastly impossibility between lovers. Ophelia is stark mad. The only gleam of a purpose left is in the brief threat that Laertes will avenge her father: 'My brother shall know of it': her only memories are dim, distracted impressions of the events that crazed her; songs of Poloniusdead and gone, At his head a grass green turf, At his feet a stone. White his shroud, as the mountain snow Which bewept to the grave did go With true-love showers. And again: And will he not come again? No, no, he is dead, Go to thy death bed, He never will come again. His beard was white as snow, He is gone, he is gone, And we cast away moan: Songs of Hamlet too: To-morrow is St. Valentine's day.' The whole ditty is but the reflex of her discarded lover's passionate jesting, the dark shadow of masculine yearning projected athwart the snows of virgin purity, deeper and distincter in this intellectual eclipse; the wild echo of his own fierce raillery resounding from the living sepulchre wherein her maiden mind lies buried. And sometimes too, the twin ideas to which her bewildered brain is feebly clinging, her love and her grief, run incoherently together: They bore him barefaced on the bier; lets, but they withered all When my father died: they say he made a good end. For bonny sweet Robin is all my joy. Ah, how true, how mournful, but above all, how marvellous this inspired imagination in whose imperishable mirror humanity seems more tangible, more intelligible, than even in its own bodily substance! Seeing nature with Shakespeare's eyes, is like reading the heavens with a glass of infinite range and power; wonder on wonder rolls into view; systems, dependencies, mysteries, relations, never before divined; tokens of other atmospheres, gleams of erratic luminaries that seem to spurn all law yet move obedient to one complex impulse; glimpses of fresh courier light cleaving the vast immensity on its way to our yet unvisited world, and all the while, the soul, uplifted by the vision, is flooded with the very music of the spheres. If aught were wanting to render this play the supreme masterpiece of human genius, it is found in the contrast between Hamlet and Laertes, each with a father murdered, and each impatient for revenge. Laertes is a hero after the popular heart; gallant, passionate, resolute; moving as level to his aim as the cannon to his blank.' He hardly hears of his father's death, before he is in Denmark; hardly in Denmark, before he storms the Palace. Unscrupulous, unconscientious, irreligious, he drives madly on where Hamlet is compelled to halt. To hell allegiance! vows to the blackest devil! With inimitable skill the mighty dramatist details precisely the forfeiture of soul from |