And still more exquisitely, — Fare thee well at once! The glow-worm shows the matin to be near And 'gins to pale his uneffectual fire. Observe, too, and this is the most wonderful feature in all this wonderful business, -how true the spirit keeps to both its past and its present existence; how doubly faithful to the world and to the grave: No reckoning made, but sent to my account With all my imperfections on my head. * If thou hast nature in thee, bear it not. Against thy mother aught: leave her to And to those thorns that in her bosom lodge, To prick and sting her. Fare thee well at once. How piteous, this chivalrous tenderness clinging even in the tomb to a lost, worthless idol! Amidst all the emotions with which Hamlet is simultaneously overwhelmed by the interview, the first to assert itself definitely is pity. One brief appeal to heaven, earth, and hell, one call on heart and sinews to bear him stiffly up, then pity, pure and profound. And, at such a moment, the capacity to pity reveals an almost infinite strength. Remember thee! Ay, thou poor ghost, while memory holds a seat And thy commandment all alone shall live Within the book and volume of my brain, Unmixed with baser matter; yes, by heaven. Up to this point nothing can be saner. But just here, for a single second, his 'distracted' brain gives way, as the vision of the 'smiling, damnéd villain' replaces that of the vanished ghost. O most pernicious woman! O villain, villain, smiling, damnéd villain. My tables, meet it is I set it down, That one may smile, and smile, and be a villain; At least I'm sure it may be so in Denmark: (Writing.) So, uncle, there you are. Now to my word; Whatever may be thought of the words, the action that doomed figure, crouching over its tables in the dim midnight, -is a flash of positive madness, brief as lightning, but as terrible too. In this moment. of supreme trial, his mind gives way the remainder of the act is a struggle to restore the lost equilibrium. And in all the annals of tragedy, there is nothing half so frightful as this tremendous conflict of a godlike reason battling for its throne against Titanic terror and despair. Lear is comparatively an easy victim. The transition from senility to dotage, from dotage to frenzy, owing to its milder contrasts cannot be as appalling as the sharp conflict between mind in its morning splendor, and the hurricane eclipse of sudden lunacy. The first soliloquy revealed a predisposition to madness; but here the man actually goes mad before our eyes—just as Lear goes mad before our eyes, save that instead of lapsing into fixed insanity like the old King, Hamlet emerges from the storm, radiant, calm, convalescent, victorious, but with a scar which he carries to his dying day. But will you call him weak because his reason sinks awhile beneath the double pressure of natural anguish and supernatural terror? Was Macbeth weak? Yet, in his own lighted halls, how quite unmanned in folly one glimpse of the bloodboltered Banquo makes him. Not till the horrible shadow is gone, is Macbeth a man again; not till the questionable shape that makes night hideous departs, does the braver soul of Hamlet betray its exhaustion; and then only after a long sigh of pity! Was Richard weak? Yet in the milder midnight of his tent, how 'the cold, fearful drops stand on his trembling flesh,' before those phantoms of a dream. By the apostle Paul, shadows to-night Have struck more terror to the soul of Richard, Than can the substance of ten thousand soldiers Arméd in proof, and led by shallow Richmond. Yet the shapes that awed those men of steel were but coinage of the brain; unreal mockeries, all; while Hamlet confronts, and confronts unappalled, a well-authenticated ghost - a ghost as visible to Horatio, Marcellus, and Bernardo, as to himself. Nor should his comparative sinlessness affect our estimate of their relative courage. The walking ghost of a murdered king, fresh from the glare of penal fires, swearing an only son to vengeance, must be |