nce confesses, is like a secret
which we have stolen from her, and which ought to die upon our hearts as
upon her own. Her sorrows ask not words but tears; and her madness has
precisely the same effect that would be produced by the spectacle of
real insanity, if brought before us: we feel inclined to turn away, and
veil our eyes in reverential pity and too painful sympathy.

Beyond every character that Shakspeare has drawn, (Hamlet alone
excepted,) that of Ophelia makes us forget the poet in his own creation.
Whenever we bring her to mind, it is with the same exclusive sense of
her real existence, without reference to the wondrous power which called
her into life. The effect (and what an effect!) is produced by means so
simple, by strokes so few, and so unobtrusive, that we take no thought
of them. It is so purely natural and unsophisticated, yet so profound in
its pathos, that, as Hazlitt observes, it takes us back to the old
ballads; we forget that, in its perfect artlessness, it is the supreme
and consummate triumph of art.

The situation of Ophelia in the story,[38] is that of a young girl who,
at an early age, is brought from a life of privacy into the circle of a
court--a court such as we read of in those early times, at once rude,
magnificent, and corrupted. She is placed immediately about the person
of the queen, and is apparently her favorite attendant. The affection
of the wicked queen for this gentle and innocent creature, is one of
those beautiful redeeming touches, one of those penetrating glances into
the secret springs of natural and feminine feeling which we find only in
Shakspeare. Gertrude, who is not so wholly abandoned but that there
remains within her heart some sense of the virtue she has forfeited,
seems to look with a kind yet melancholy complacency on the lovely being
she has destined for the bride of her son; and the scene in which she is
introduced as scattering flowers on the grave of Ophelia, is one of
those effects of contrast in poetry, in character and in feeling, at
once natural and unexpected; which fill the eye, and make the heart
swell and tremble within itself--like the nightingales singing in the
grove of the Furies in Sophocles.[39]

Again, in the father of Ophelia, the Lord Chamberlain Polonius--the
shrewd, wary, subtle, pompous, garrulous old courtier--have we not the
very man who would send his son into the world to see all, learn all it
could teach of good and evil, but keep