revenge for a father foully murdered-the act inculcated directly by a messenger from the other world, and that messenger his father's ghost-must have become a solemn and righteous duty. It is the meditative character of his mind which paralyzes the power of action; he considers events in so many relations, and forecasts possibilities with so nice an ingenuity that he is unable to come to any resolution. He sincerely accepts the sacred duty which the buried majesty of Denmark imposes upon him, and never relinquishes the idea of accomplishing the commanded vengeance; but it is the misery of his nature that he is incapable of dismissing the idea from his mind, or of carrying it into execution. He eagerly seeks for excuses for delaying action; to some extent he plays the hypocrite to himself when he finds a reason for his irresolution in the uncertainty as to the ghost's reality; and afterward, when he surprises the king at prayer, and has an excellent opportunity for executing his task, he sets forth an elaborate and villanous reason for not doing what he cannot resolve to do. It is not so much that he wishes to surprise the king in some deed that "hath no relish of salvation in it "-it is not that he truly cherished the fiendish sentiments which he utters-which now causes him to let the opportunity go by, but that he gladly seizes on any excuse for procrastination. At a critical juncture, in which it might seem impossible to coin any justification for not acting, Hamlet's active mind finds a motive for further delay in a reasoning which maligns his moral nature, but which is in exact accordance with his intellectual character.

This state of reflective indecision is a stage of development through which minds of a certain character pass before they consciously acquire by exercise a habit of willing. He who is passionately impulsive and has no hesitation at eighteen, is, perhaps, reflective and doubtful at twenty-five; and in a few years more he may, if he develop rightly, be deliberately resolute. For the will is not innate, but is gradually built up by successive acts of volition: a character, as Nova

lis said, is a completely fashioned will. Had Hamlet lived and developed beyond the melancholy stage of life-weariness. in which he is represented, and through which men of a certain ability often pass, it may be supposed that he would have been affected very differently by a deed like that which was imposed upon him. Either it was a duty, and, according to his insight into its relations, practicable, and he would then lay down a definite plan of action; or it was not, according to his judgment, practicable, and he would then dismiss the idea of acting, and leave things to take their course. As years pass on, they bring surely home to the individual the lesson that life is too short for him to afflict himself about what he cannot help. There is a sufficiency of work in which every one may employ his energies, and things irremediable must be wisely left to take, unbewailed, their way. To rail at the events of Nature is nothing else but the expression of an extravagant self-consciousness; it is the vanity which springs from an excessive self-feeling that finds the world to be out of joint, and would undertake to set it right. He only would undertake the government of the universe who cannot govern his own mind. The wisely-cultivated man, conscious how insignificant a drop he is in the vast stream of life, learns his limitation and accepts events with modesty and equanimity.

When Hamlet does any thing, he is usually determined by some accident, and acts under the influence of a sudden impulse. In fact, as he said that Polonius was at supper, "not where he eats, but where he is eaten," so we might say of him that he is engaged in a dráma, not where he acts, but where he is acted upon. The consequence is, that a variety of incidents necessarily takes place; there is no definite will giving to events a certain direction, and the progress of the play is delayed accordingly. As Hamlet does not act upon the circumstances, they crowd around him, and grow, as it were, upon him: more and mored ifficult does it become for him who does not develop in proportion to the development

of events, to act. “Here is an oak platted in a vase proper only to receive the most delicate of flowers. The roots strike out, the vessel flies to pieces." Hamlet's deliberative inac tion and his impulsive action alike increase the difficulties around him: an irresolute man is like a magnet to attract difficulties about him; an impulsive man often multiplies them by his spasmodic energy, which irritates and increases antagonisms-not otherwise than as intermittent pressure upon some part of the body solicits a hypertrophy of the tissue beneath, when a continued pressure produces an atrophy. He passionately demands of the ghost-who is the villanous author of his miseries-that with wings as swift as meditation or the thoughts of love he may sweep to his revenge, and in a little while doubts whether the ghost is not a coinage of his distempered brain; he recklessly follows it when it beckons him, registers a solemn vow to remember it as long as memory holds its seat, and quietly takes ship for England. He stabs Polonius under a sudden impulse when he hears a noise behind the arras, and soliloquizes elaborately when he finds the king alone at his prayers. When the pirate vessel overtakes the ship in which he is sailing for England, he impulsively boards it and is carried away. When he sees Laertes jump into Ophelia's grave, he jumps in also, and rants more wildly than Laertes. When he learns that the sword is poisoned, on the instant he stabs the king. If we except the scheme by which he makes use of the players, the only thing which he does deliberately is to feign madness, and he adopts that resolution with a strange suddenness. As a matter of policy, it was difficult to see how such feigning could be of advantage to his purpose; as a matter of fact it was dangerous, and all but wrecked his design.

The melancholy and life-weary frame of mind in which Hamlet is represented was exactly that likely to be produced in a young man of his disposition under his circumstances. He was of a proud and generous nature, nobly ambitious, the accomplished scholar, soldier, and courtier. He had grown

Goethe

up supported by his great father's countenance, and accustomed to the respect and homage which attend upon the king's son and the expected heir to the throne. But his father dies suddenly, and his uncle "pops in between the election and his hopes," and not in a straightforward and honorable manner; but by underhand cunning steals the precious diadem like a cutpurse of the empire-a treacherous, kindless villain that he was. And now all is sadly changed. Hamlet is almost a stranger in what was his father's house, and scarce welcome there where he had been the observed of all observers. "I will not," he says to Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, "sort you with the rest of my servants; for, to speak to you like an honest man, I am most dreadfully attended." Though he is still the "most immediate to the throne," though he has the voice of the king for his succession in Denmark, his sincere nature is disgusted by the experience of such villany in a kinsman, as his ambition is disappointed by the failure of his expectations, and his royal pride injured by the attendant diminution of personal consequence.

"King. How fares our cousin Hamlet ?

Hamlet. Excellent, i' faith, of the chamelion's dish; I eat the air, promise crammed: you cannot feed capons so."

It is not so much the loss of the throne which overwhelms him-although unconsciously that embitters his grief-as the treachery which he has awakened to. The loss of faith in humanity oppresses his soul; he has learned, in a painful but decisive way, that a living dog is better than a dead lion." Those who a few months ago would make mouths at his uncle, now give fifty or a hundred ducats "for his picture in little."

But worse, far worse than all the disappointment of his expectations is, to his proud and sensitive nature, the marriage of his mother. He feels himself infinitely degraded in the bitter degradation of his mother.

"Would I had met my dearest foe in heaven
Ere I had seen that day, Horatio 1 "

That it should come to this, that his mother, almost before her tears for so excellent a king were dry, should not merely desert the cause of her only son, but hastily marry him who had treacherously supplanted her son. To a proud nature what can be more afflicting than the deep disgrace of a mother? And as it is impossible, when offended with any one, not to think him worse than he really is, so Hamlet becomes utterly horrified and frantic as he broods over his mother's conduct.

"O Heaven! a beast that wants discourse of reason
Would have mourned longer-married with mine uncle,
My father's brother; but no more like my father
Than I to Hercules.

O most wicked speed, to post

With such dexterity to incestuous sheets!

It is not, nor it cannot, come to good."

The matter is made almost unendurable to him by the exceeding activity of his imagination; he torments himself continually with vivid pictures of the scenes of his mother's intercourse with her new and odious husband. Some have been offended at the coarse and naked way in which, in his interview with his mother, he dwells so minutely upon the king's amorous dalliance, and have censured his brutality; they would, for the sake of the proprieties, destroy the consistency of the character, and have revolutions made with rose-water. This so-called indelicacy of Hamlet is a special excellence, for it is the consistent result of his active self-torturing imagination. Truly, imagination has its pleasures, but it has its pains also: it inspires the creations of genius, but how much of the miseries of genius does it not create! It has been said again that his language was unnecessarily violent, and that he abused the king in terms which were almost false from their extravagance. True; but he had to produce an impression on one who had eagerly accepted this man for her husband, and showed no inclination to rue her