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

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 mon-
ument of all that was once real. Was such a con-
sciousness 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 ob-
jects 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

theatre perhaps in some measure gave a direction, and the strong sense of life which must necessarily have accompanied it, leads us to the negation of the two, as the idea on which his mind would dwell most frequently and with the most concern. We find this thought therefore standing out more or less prominently throughout all his plays, and forming, as I have before said, the ground-plan of Hamlet. I cannot help quoting in this connection a passage from "As You Like It," which only Shakspeare could have written. The words are so simple that a fool might have uttered them, though only the wisest of men knew it. Yet none could impress upon us more strongly the fact that we live, and that

"All that live must die

Passing through nature to eternity."

"A fool, a fool!—I met a fool i' the forest,

A motley fool; a miserable world!.

As I do live by food, I met a fool ;

Who laid him down and bask'd him in the sun,
And railed on lady Fortune in good terms,

In good set terms, and yet a motley fool.
Good-morrow, fool, quoth I: No, sir, quoth he,
Call me not fool, till heaven hath sent me fortune:
And then he drew a dial from his poke;
And looking on it with lack-lustre eye
Says, very wisely, It is ten o'clock:

Thus may we see, quoth he, how the world wags: 'Tis but an hour ago, since it was nine;

And after an hour more, 'twill be eleven;

And so from hour to hour, we ripe and ripe,
And then, from hour to hour, we rot, and rot,
And thereby hangs a tale."

These feelings caused Shakspeare to live beyond the influence of fame, and, though disturbed, as we have shown, by the thought of where or how he might exist in another world, he still felt the fact; and fame can only be a motive to those who have no practical belief in the next world, or to whom it is an uncertainty. With the celebrated minds of antiquity, this was the case; and they found in the thought of fame some consolation for that activity and sense of life which they felt to be their great attributes, as if, that living tongues should tell of their existence, was nearest to life itself. Think not that it is for the paltry praise of others, that such have lived and suffered; believe it not, even though they themselves knew not the spirit they were of, and in their ignorance believed it; no-it could not be ;it was the promptings of an immortal nature that urged them to live,—to live, though it were to be but a thought in the memory of others. In this yearning of the spirit for being, for immortality, is seen a sign of its relationship to God; that it is in very deed the