the Soliloquy is not only superfluous and contradictory, but absurd. Unhappy as it is in all other respects, it serves to demonstrate conclusively that in Shakespeare's own mind, the piratical capture was a premeditated certainty. It With its present Fifth Scene, the Fourth Act properly begins. One victim has already fallen - Polonius: Ophelia is the next. The shock of her father's death by the hand of her lover, has crazed her. would have suited most artists to exhibit the first crash of the tragical fact; but Shakespeare mercifully spares us the sight of the blow descending on that vestal forehead. Her mind is murdered off the stage. The grand master will not overcharge his canvas with details which a lesser soul would grasp at. The spiritual transformation is complete before she reappears. Instead of horror heaped on horror, the very madness of this Rose of May is turned to favor and to prettiness.' She softens the gloom and terror of the play into over 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 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 Polonius— dead 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 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, 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; And again : There's a daisy : I would give you some vio lets, but they withered all When my father died: they say he made a good 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 |