science in mental
philosophy. Indeed, that this character must have some connection with the
common fundamental laws of our nature may be assumed from the fact, that
Hamlet has been the darling of every country in which the literature of
England has been fostered. In order to understand him, it is essential
that we should reflect on the constitution of our own minds. Man is
distinguished from the brute animals in proportion as thought prevails
over sense: but in the healthy processes of the mind, a balance is
constantly maintained between the impressions from outward objects and the
inward operations of the intellect;--for if there be an overbalance in the
contemplative faculty, man thereby becomes the creature of mere
meditation, and loses his natural power of action. Now one of
Shakespeare's modes of creating characters is, to conceive any one
intellectual or moral faculty in morbid excess, and then to place himself,
Shakespeare, thus mutilated or diseased, under given circumstances. In
Hamlet he seems to have wished to exemplify the moral necessity of a due
balance between our attention to the objects of our senses, and our
meditation on the workings of our minds,--an _equilibrium_ between the real
and the imaginary worlds. In Hamlet this balance is disturbed: his
thoughts, and the images of his fancy, are far more vivid than his actual
perceptions, and his very perceptions, instantly passing through the
_medium_ of his contemplations, acquire, as they pass, a form and a colour
not naturally their own. Hence we see a great, an almost enormous,
intellectual activity, and a proportionate aversion to real action,
consequent upon it, with all its symptoms and accompanying qualities. This
character Shakespeare places in circumstances, under which it is obliged
to act on the spur of the moment:--Hamlet is brave and careless of death;
but he vacillates from sensibility, and procrastinates from thought, and
loses the power of action in the energy of resolve. Thus it is that this
tragedy presents a direct contrast to that of _Macbeth_; the one proceeds
with the utmost slowness, the other with a crowded and breathless
rapidity.

The effect of this overbalance of the imaginative power is beautifully
illustrated in the everlasting broodings and superfluous activities of
Hamlet's mind, which, unseated from its healthy relation, is constantly
occupied with the world within, and abstracted from the world
without,--giving substance