the true soul will be the conscious expression of nature. Shakspeare was natural; but, if we may judge from his writings and life, he must have been as unconsciously so as a field or a stream. As we have said, he was not moved by common motives; he wished but to live, and he passed without a preference through all the forms of living, and may be said to have been most truly himself in being others. Had he pursued the same course from a sense of duty, there would have been added to his characters that strength of will, or remorse at its loss in which we feel them especially wanting. That he acted from impulse and not from principle, shows us that he is not to be regarded as a man so much as a phenomenon; that the tribute he would ask was admiration rather than praise. The careless manner in which he left his works has been wondered at, and lauded long enough, we hope, for christian men. When will we learn that the thing we call a man wants that which alone can entitle it to that appellation, when he can think a thought, or do a single act, much less leave the works of a whole life with ostrich-like indifference on the barren sands of a world's neglect, without one look behind at their influence on the eternal happiness or misery of all being. "Twas God's care only that the mind he sent labored not in vain. Action, in which God's will is not the motive, is sending the lightning flashes of heaven to play for

men's amusement among the far-off clouds; and not to flash in warning across the dark path of destruction in which they are treading. It is the successive peals of thunder which, instead of purifying the moral atmosphere, are made to roll and burst only to create vainly repeated echoes among the hills. Shakspeare, though at times he may have been possessed of this genius, must, in far the most numerous of his days and years, have been possessed by it. Lost in wonder at the countless beings that thronged uncalled the palace of his soul, and dwelt beneath its "majestical roof fretted with golden fires;" he knew not, or if he knew, forgot that even those angel visitants were not sent for him merely to admire and number; but that knowing no will but His who made kings his subjects, he should send them forth on their high mission, and with those high resolves which it was left for him to communicate. Had he done this, we might indeed reverence him as the image of his God; as a sharer in His service, whose service is perfect freedom.

From God's action in the mind of such men, we may learn, though with less clearness, that great lesson of Humility which He has revealed through his word. From genius, as well as revelation, we learn that our actions can alone become harmonious with the universality and naturalness which we see in the outward world, when they are made to accord

with the will of our Father. From both we learn, that of ourselves we can do no positive act; but have only the power given us to render of no avail that which is so that we cannot make one hair white or black; that our seeming strength is weakness, nay, worse than weakness, unless it co-operates with God's. Let us labor then, knowing that the more we can erase from the tablets of our hearts the false fashions and devices which our own perverse wills have written over them, the more will shine forth, with all their original brightness, those ancient primeval characters, traced there by the finger of God, until our whole being is full of light.

HAMLET.

THE play of Hamlet, when viewed with reference to the character of Shakspeare, which we have given, will no longer stand in that unique relation to the rest of his performances it has hitherto held; but will be found to be more vitally connected, than any of them, with the great characteristics of the poet's mind. We have chosen this, therefore, because it illustrates our previous remarks; and because these, in their turn, afford the position from which it is to be viewed. As to the time of its composition, it stands at about an equal distance between his first and last play; and, we think, we can see the influence of this upon those that succeed, in giving them more of a sobered and tragical interest. Those who have attempted an explanation of it, have failed from the want of a just conception of Hamlet's situation and character. In Lear, and in many other

of Shakspeare's plays, the chief character seems naturally to be that for which all the others were formed; and, however important these are at first, as objects for the eye to rest on, they seem, at last, to the mind, but as shadings to show the main one in the strongest light. This is especially the case with Hamlet; and they who have commented on it, seem to have erred from viewing that as of the greatest importance, which Shakspeare must have considered but as accidental. There is, to use his own words,

something more than natural” in this tragedy, "if philosophy could find it out." That which makes it so, is the playing up, in a peculiar manner, of the great features of Shakspeare's own mind that sense of existence which must have been, as we have said, the accompanying state of so much and so varied activity. Hence the darkness which has so long hung over it; a darkness which, for us, can only be dispelled, when we too rest on the same simple basis.

Instead of feeling, continually, that the life is more than the food, and the body than the raiment; we live as if it were directly the other way, and by that very state of mind, are incapacitated almost from conceiving of one who stood in a truer relation to things; to whose thoughts, time and space seem not to adhere as to ours- who could " put a girdle round about the earth in forty minutes," and to whom this, our life of years, was but "a bank and shoal of