After all that has been said to explain the apparent inactivity of Hamlet, we must still feel that, although we have accounted for, and shown the naturalness of his delay, yet the character of the son, and he "the son of a dear father murdered," is still somewhat less earnest in Hamlet than we should have expected. This particular view of his circumstance, which we have given, is pressed too far home to be entirely natural. It seems as if Shakspeare, feeling a more than common sympathy with the situation he had assumed for the expression of his own feelings, put too much of himself, so to speak, in the composition. We feel that Hamlet is rather such a son as Shakspeare would have made, than the Hamlet of the king's own household. The poet's intention. in this play was not, we think, as Goethe says, “to exhibit the effects of a great action imposed as a duty on a mind too feeble for its accomplishment;" nor, as Coleridge expresses it, "to exhibit a character flying from the sense of reality and seeking a reprieve from the pressure of its duties in that ideal activity, the overbalance of which with the consequent indisposition to action is Hamlet's disease." These are but accidents, and had the design been such as these suppose in Shakspeare, this play would never have been written. No, it was not for ends like these, but for an end of which these should prove but accidents. Was he strongly sensible of a

purpose, — it must have been to open to our view that wild tumultuous sea of thoughts which was rolling in the breast of Hamlet, when the idea of death and the presence of things invisible, stood sensible to sight and touch before him. This thought, breaking upon him in so terrible and unexpected a form, tore from life, at one rude grasp, the gaudy and alluring attire with which it is arrayed to the eye of sense; and, blotting out "all trivial fond records, all saws of books," it fronted him in its own grim reality. Well might he feel, if this was all there was of living, to him it was valueless. Unlike Claudio and Macbeth, the goods of this world, were they all, appeared not to him of consequence enough to deserve a moment's regard; —in the wide firmament of his vision, time and space had dwindled to what they really are, but golden points of an immensity.

Hamlet has been called mad, but, as we think, Shakspeare thought more of his madness than he did of the wisdom of the rest of the play. Like the vision-struck Paul, in the presence of Felix, he spoke what to those around him, whose eyes had not been opened on that light brighter than the sun, seemed madness; but which was, in fact, the words of truth and soberness. Men have felt that though mad, as they thought, there was still a method in it; and that there was something in his language which revealed them to themselves, and to which, though

ignorant of its full meaning, every human heart must and does beat responsive. We must not suppose from the impression that words make upon us, that we necessarily understand what they mean to others. We are but too apt to mistake for knowledge the sounds that give us a mere outside recognition of the states of mind from which they proceeded. It is the spirit that quickens what we hear,

the mere hearing is nothing. The words which I say to you, says our Savior, are spirit, and quicken with eternal life, they are not addressed to the flesh, nor are they life-giving to that. We must not think, because we know the dictionary meaning of the word Death, and can enumerate a few of the sensible changes it produces, that we know its whole meaning,- all that one feels when it has become a frequent thought to his mind, modifying, as it was designed to do, every other thought. Much less must we suppose ourselves to have found the divine meaning of that eternal life of which Jesus speaks; until we have experienced that death of our own wills, against which we are to strive continually in our minds unto blood. Shakspeare's words too, like those of all true men, have a meaning whose fulness can only be felt by a spirit in a similar state to his from whose lips they fell. Spoken without this, they are but sounds filling the empty chambers of the soul with noisy echoes. They pass be

fore us, dim and shadowy, as the phantom kings before the eyes of Macbeth, the silent witnesses of a world to us unrealized;-speechless, save as the workings of our own souls give them utterance. Let us not then suppose, that, by treasuring up the golden language that has fallen from other tongues of power, we are gaining for ourselves a fast possession ; for unless their spirit is growing up within us, to fill their dumb words with the eloquence of life, our piled wealth, like the rich colored leaves of autumn, will shrink in our hands to the dark and worthless emblems of decay.

We need not go farther to show, what will now be apparent, the tendency of Shakspeare to overact this particular part of Hamlet, and thus give it an obscurity from too close a connexion with his own mind, a state so difficult to approach. It is plain that to him the thought of death, and the condition of being to which that change might subject him, would ever be his nearest thoughts; and that, whereever there exists the strong sense of life, these ideas must follow hard upon it. In the question of Hamlet, the thoughts, as well as the words, have their natural order, when "to be" is followed by 66 "" not to be." And we think that no one can read the words of Claudio, or the soliloquy of Hamlet, without thinking that, for Shakspeare, they must have had no common meaning. Here we find a reason for his occu

pying so strongly this particular position. This idea not only renders the inconsistencies of Hamlet harmonious, but places also the whole tragedy on a common ground with the rest of Shakspeare's plays. Viewed in its light they all become but part and parcel of one mind; without it, Hamlet must always remain, as it has hitherto done, a character apart from that of the others, darkened with a mystery too deep for us to scan. Our thoughts, and those of Hamlet and Shakspeare are strangely opposite. With them, to be or not to be, that is the question; with us there is no question at all about that, we take that to be settled. With us, to be rich or not to be rich, to be wise or not to be wise, to be honored or not to be honored, those are the questions. It is because we live so continually in this state of mind, that we are unable to conceive of Hamlet's character, and to see Shakspeare himself in his creations. This it is that inclines many to say of the celebrated soliloquy, as Goldsmith has said, that it " is in our opinion, a heap of absurdities, whether we consider the situation, the sentiments, the argumentation or the poetry; that it does not appear that Hamlet had the least reason to wish for death, but every motive which may be supposed to influence, concurred to render life desirable, revenge towards the usurper; love for the fair Ophelia; and the ambition of reigning." We should naturally think with Goldsmith, and think

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