given a true
notion of his condition both mental and bodily. Although weeks have
passed since his interview with the Ghost, he is still haunted with the
memory of it, still broods over its horrible revelation. That he had,
probably soon, begun to feel far from certain of the truth of the
apparition, could not make the thoughts and questions it had awaked,
cease tormenting his whole being. The stifling smoke of his mother's
conduct had in his mind burst into loathsome flame, and through her he
has all but lost his faith in humanity. To know his uncle a villain, was
to know his uncle a villain; to know his mother false, was to doubt
women, doubt the whole world.

In the meantime Ophelia, in obedience to her father, and evidently
without reason assigned, has broken off communication with him: he reads
her behaviour by the lurid light of his mother's. She too is false! she
too is heartless! he can look to her for no help! She has turned against
him to curry favour with his mother and his uncle!

Can she be such as his mother! Why should she not be? His mother had
seemed as good! He would give his life to know her honest and pure.
Might he but believe her what he had believed her, he would yet have a
hiding-place from the wind, a covert from the tempest! If he could but
know the truth! Alone with her once more but for a moment, he would read
her very soul by the might of his! He must see her! He would see her! In
the agony of a doubt upon which seemed to hang the bliss or bale of his
being, yet not altogether unintimidated by a sense of his intrusion, he
walks into the house of Polonius, and into the chamber of Ophelia.

Ever since the night of the apparition, the court, from the behaviour
assumed by Hamlet, has believed his mind affected; and when he enters
her room, Ophelia, though such is the insight of love that she is able
to read in the face of the son the father's purgatorial sufferings, the
picture of one 'loosed out of hell, to speak of horrors,' attributes all
the strangeness of his appearance and demeanour, such as she describes
them to her father, to that supposed fact. But there is, in truth, as
little of affected as of actual madness in his behaviour in her
presence. When he comes before her pale and trembling, speechless and
with staring eyes, it is with no simulated insanity, but in the agonized
hope, scarce distinguishable from despair, of finding, in the testimony
of her visible presence, an assurance th