d to see
in her action not only an astounding shallowness of feeling but an
eruption of coarse sensuality, 'rank and gross,'[44] speeding post-haste
to its horrible delight. Is it possible to conceive an experience more
desolating to a man such as we have seen Hamlet to be; and is its result
anything but perfectly natural? It brings bewildered horror, then
loathing, then despair of human nature. His whole mind is poisoned. He
can never see Ophelia in the same light again: she is a woman, and his
mother is a woman: if she mentions the word 'brief' to him, the answer
drops from his lips like venom, 'as woman's love.' The last words of the
soliloquy, which is _wholly_ concerned with this subject, are,

But break, my heart, for I must hold my tongue!

He can do nothing. He must lock in his heart, not any suspicion of his
uncle that moves obscurely there, but that horror and loathing; and if
his heart ever found relief, it was when those feelings, mingled with
the love that never died out in him, poured themselves forth in a flood
as he stood in his mother's chamber beside his father's
marriage-bed.[45]

If we still wonder, and ask why the effect of this shock should be so
tremendous, let us observe that _now_ the conditions have arisen under
which Hamlet's highest endowments, his moral sensibility and his genius,
become his enemies. A nature morally blunter would have felt even so
dreadful a revelation less keenly. A slower and more limited and
positive mind might not have extended so widely through its world the
disgust and disbelief that have entered it. But Hamlet has the
imagination which, for evil as well as good, feels and sees all things
in one. Thought is the element of his life, and his thought is
infected. He cannot prevent himself from probing and lacerating the
wound in his soul. One idea, full of peril, holds him fast, and he cries
out in agony at it, but is impotent to free himself ('Must I remember?'
'Let me not think on't'). And when, with the fading of his passion, the
vividness of this idea abates, it does so only to leave behind a
boundless weariness and a sick longing for death.

And this is the time which his fate chooses. In this hour of uttermost
weakness, this sinking of his whole being towards annihilation, there
comes on him, bursting the bounds of the natural world with a shock of
astonishment and terror, the revelation of his mother's adultery and his
father's murder, and, with this, the