in sin and the flesh, that this vast globe and millions of others should roll on their limitless ways with the speed of thought, moved but by a will kindred with our own. But would we take our just position in regard to the objects of sense; and, instead of finding ourselves revolving around them, did they seem like harmonized spheres enlightened and moved by the strong working principles of duty and love within us, we should then indeed feel of a truth our relationship to our Father, and that for matter to obey His will was but its natural law. Do we wonder then, that, as this momentary petrifaction of the heart goes on, we are every day more and more strangers in this world of love, holding no communion with the Universal Parent, and hoarding up instead of distributing His general gifts? As we resist this process, the resulting state must evidently be one with which we may interpret the mind of Shakspeare, a sense of eternal life, an activity communicated to all else, and not merely one communicated to us from without; we are no longer the servants of sin, but the free followers of Christ.

As, therefore, the activity of the mind, freed by an exertion of the will, must ever be connected with the sense of eternal life, so is there joined with the mind's involuntary freedom a sense of existence that constitutes its innocent happiness, and makes it the natural teacher to us of the wide principle which

is its mission. In Claudio's reflections on death, the poet unconsciously lays bare the texture of his own mind. Claudio regrets not, as we should suppose he would, the loss of his sister, or the good things of this world, nor feels a doubt of another; but all his horrors are but the negations of these two great characteristics of Shakspeare's own mind,—the barring up of his varied activity, and the losing in a kneaded clod of the sensible warm motion of life.

“Ay, but to die, and go we know not where;
To lie in cold obstruction, and to rot;
This sensible warm motion to become
A kneaded clod; and the delighted spirit.
To bathe in fiery floods, or to reside
In thrilling regions of thick-ribbed ice;
To be imprisoned in the viewless winds,
And blown with restless violence round about
The pendent world; or to be worse than worst
Of those that lawless and uncertain thoughts
Imagine howling!-'tis too horrible!

The weariest and most loathed worldly life,
That age, ache, penury, and imprisonment
Can lay on nature, is a paradise

To what we fear of death."

And again, in Clarence's dream of death, so strongly is the resistance of the soul to this imprisoning of it

expressed, that we feel a sense of suffocation in

reading it.

"Often did I strive

To yield the ghost: but still the envious flood
Kept in my soul, and would not let it forth
To seek the empty, vast, and wand'ring air;
But smother'd it within my panting bulk,
Which almost burst to belch it in the sea.'

The play of Hamlet is founded on these two characteristics, and they are apparent throughout; as we shall endeavor to show by a separate analysis of it. We are continually hearing the poet himself speaking out through the words of Hamlet. As we become more and more conscious of that state of mind which our Savior calls eternal life, we shall the better understand the natural superiority of such a mind as Shakspeare's to the narrowing influences which we have to resist, but which his involuntary activity rendered powerless. That a sense of life would be the accompaniment of this activity would then be apparent; for how could that childlike love of variety and joyous sympathy with all things exist, save from that simple happiness which in him ever flowed from the consciousness of being, but which, alas, by most of us is known but in youth? Between the dignified and trivial, between decay and bloom, how else could he have felt that connecting link, of which

we are insensible, enabling him to present them all united as in the moving panorama that encircles us. This life of his in all objects and scenes was the simple result of the movements of a mind which found only in all it saw around it, something to correspond with its own condition. Its own activity was its possession; circumstances and things seemed to be, because it was; these were accidents, and not, as with other men, realities. His power while exerted on every thing seems independent of its objects. Like the ocean, his mind could fill with murmuring waves the strangely indented coast of human existence from the widest bay to the smallest creek; then ebbing, retire within itself, as if form was but a mode of its limitless and independent being. Did love succeed necessity, we should need no other explanation of such a mind than our own would give us. We all feel at first that the life is more than the meat, but from the corrupt world around us we soon learn to prize the meat more than our spiritual life. We learn indeed, while children, the fallacy of sacrificing our physical existence to any thing inferior, and to look upon it as that to which all other ends are to be made subservient; but we grow up and grow old without ever discerning a far more cunning fallacy for which the other was but a preparatory step, and we live on, merging the thought of our being in its daily accidents, and immolating the life

T

of the spirit before the idol of its desires. Instead of this, we should be quickening by our daily life that spiritual consciousness which otherwise, in the hour of death, we shall feel that we have lost; when the eye that saw, and the ear that heard, have done their tasks; when the heavens which that eye has so long gazed upon are rolling together as a scroll, and the thousand tones of music which the ear has drank from the earth are hushed, and the affrighted soul turns inward upon itself as the sole remaining monument of all that was once real. Was such a consciousness ours, then indeed might we sympathize with Shakspeare; then might the lofty thought which Milton felt in his blindness and age, forever permeate our being, and lift us to that height from which, like him, we could look down on the world and the objects of sense beneath; and as we gazed with the soul's pure eyes, and a mind irradiated with that celestial light for which he prayed, we too might exclaim

"For who would lose,
Though full of pain, this intellectual being,
These thoughts that wander through eternity,
To perish rather swallowed up and lost
In the wide womb of uncreated night,
Devoid of sense and motion ?”

This activity of mind in Shakspeare, to which the