Do not forever with thy vailèd lids Passing through nature to eternity. Ham. Ay, madam; it is common. Her maternal platitudes are shivered by the easy scorn of his reply. But this resolute woman, then undergoing perhaps her first experience in being silenced, answers very much to the purpose: If it be, Why seems it so particular with thee? Ham. Seems, madam ! It is like 'the flash and motion' of Geraint. No more questionings, but we pray you, "we beseech you,' 't is sweet and commendable in your nature,' 'let not thy mother lose her prayers,' 'be as ourself in Denmark.' And he? - he is hardly listening: he will, in all his best, obey them: he will stay at home and not go back to school at Wittenberg. For let it not be forgotten, that this superb intelligence, whose career Collegian, even of thirty, summoned by That wondrous first soliloquy is the simultaneous presentation of a plot and of a character, — of all the tragic antecedents of the Play, and of Hamlet struggling through the gloom, the incarnation of eloquent despair. O, that this too too solid flesh would melt, Or that the Everlasting had not fix'd His canon 'gainst self-slaughter! O God! X How weary, stale, flat and unprofitable Is this a sample of the imputed 'wavering melancholy and soft lamenting?' Since the Psalms of David, and the still deeper pathos of the Passion, where has mental agony found such awful utterance? Nor is the final line, But break, my heart, for I must hold my tongue! any evidence of weakness. For what could the man say ? The throne was not hereditary; his mother was mistress of her own hand; he had no proof, not even a fixed suspicion, of foul play. His tongue was sealed until the coming of the Ghost. It is manifest from the King's speech at the opening of the second scene, that the royal pair are then giving their first audience of state. Cornelius and Voltimond are dispatched to Norway; the suit of Laertes is heard and granted; and Hamlet, who was not to be trusted abroad, forbidden to return to Wittenberg. Most assuredly, it is Hamlet's first public reappearance. Since his father's funeral, he. has lived in the strictest seclusion, or he could not else be ignorant of Horatio's presence in Elsinore. It may be as well to remember this; for the play is so elliptical, that one is apt to marvel why the two friends have not sooner met. Some hint of Hamlet's having been summoned to Court to be publicly warned from reentering the University, must have leaked out, or we should scarcely have Marcellus saying And I this morning know Where we shall find him most conveniently. Horatio respected the Prince's privacy until forced by love and duty to invade it. But he could scarcely have been prepared for the sad change in his schoolmate. He, as well as Ophelia, had only known him as The courtier's, soldier's, scholar's, eye, tongue, sword; The expectancy and Rose of the fair state, With too much reason, Hamlet had lost all trust in his mother; and when we cease to trust our mothers, we cease to trust humanity. Hamlet belonged to that middle circle of the Sons of Light, who become cynics, instead of villains, in adversity. Characters of perfect sincerity, of exhaustless tenderness, of ready trust, when once deceived by the few that were dearest, become irrevocably mistrustful of all. Your commonplace neighbor who knows himself a sham, accepts, perhaps prefers, a society of shams; has no idea of being very true to anybody, or of anybody's being very true to him; leads a sham life and dies a sham death, -as near as the latter achievement is possible, leaving a set of sham mourners behind him. But the heart whose perfect insight is blinded only by its perfect love, once fooled in its tenderest faith, |