ng powers;
it is the total imbecility which, as medical people well know,
frequently follows some terrible shock to the spirits. Constance is
frantic; Lear is mad; Ophelia is _insane_. Her sweet mind lies in
fragments before us--a pitiful spectacle! Her wild, rambling fancies;
her aimless, broken speeches; her quick transitions from gayety to
sadness--each equally purposeless and causeless; her snatches of old
ballads, such as perhaps her nurse sung her to sleep with in her
infancy--are all so true to the life, that we forget to wonder, and can
only weep. It belonged to Shakspeare alone so to temper such a picture
that we can endure to dwell upon it:--

Thought and affliction, passion, hell itself,
She turns to favor and to prettiness.

That in her madness she should exchange her bashful silence for empty
babbling, her sweet maidenly demeanor for the impatient restlessness
that spurns at straws, and say and sing precisely what she never would
or could have uttered had she been in possession of her reason, is so
far from being an impropriety, that it is an additional stroke of
nature. It is one of the symptoms of this species of insanity, as we are
assured by physicians. I have myself known one instance in the case of a
young Quaker girl, whose character resembled that of Ophelia, and whose
malady arose from a similar cause.

The whole action of this play sweeps past us like a torrent, which
hurries along in its dark and resistless course all the personages of
the drama towards a catastrophe that is not brought about by human will,
but seems like an abyss ready dug to receive them, where the good and
the wicked are whelmed together.[43] As the character of Hamlet has been
compared, or rather contrasted, with the Greek Orestes, being like him,
called on to avenge a crime by a crime, tormented by remorseful doubts,
and pursued by distraction, so, to me, the character of Ophelia bears a
certain relation to that of the Greek Iphigenia,[44] with the same
strong distinction between the classical and the romantic conception of
the portrait. Iphigenia led forth to sacrifice, with her unresisting
tenderness, her mournful sweetness, her virgin innocence, is doomed to
perish by that relentless power, which has linked her destiny with
crimes and contests, in which she has no part but as a sufferer; and
even so, poor Ophelia, "divided from herself and her fair judgment,"
appears here like a spotless victim offered up to th