s resolve is instant, and the act simultaneous with
the resolve. The weak man is sure to be found wanting when immediate
action is necessary; Hamlet never is. Doubtless those who blame him as
dilatory, here blame him as precipitate, for they judge according to
appearance and consequence.

All his delay after this is plainly compelled, although I grant he was
not sorry to have to await such _more presentable_ evidence as at last
he procured, so long as he did not lose the final possibility of
vengeance.]

[Footnote 4: This is the sole reference in the interview to the murder.
I take it for tentative, and that Hamlet is satisfied by his mother's
utterance, carriage, and expression, that she is innocent of any
knowledge of that crime. Neither does he allude to the adultery: there
is enough in what she cannot deny, and that only which can be remedied
needs be taken up; while to break with the king would open the door of
repentance for all that had preceded.]

[Footnote 5: He says nothing of the Ghost to his mother.]

[Footnote 6: She still holds up and holds out.]

[Footnote 7: 'makes Modesty itself suspected.']

[Footnote 8: 'makes Innocence ashamed of the love it cherishes.']

[Footnote 9: 'plucks the spirit out of all forms of contracting or
agreeing.' We have lost the social and kept only the physical meaning of
the noun.]

[Footnote 10: I cannot help thinking the _Quarto_ reading of this
passage the more intelligible, as well as much the more powerful. We may
imagine a red aurora, by no means a very unusual phenomenon, over the
expanse of the sky:--

Heaven's face doth glow (_blush_)
O'er this solidity and compound mass,

(_the earth, solid, material, composite, a corporeal mass in
confrontment with the spirit-like etherial, simple, uncompounded heaven
leaning over it_)

With tristful (_or_ heated, _as the reader may choose_)
visage: as against the doom,

(_as in the presence, or in anticipation of the revealing judgment_)

Is thought sick at the act.

(_thought is sick at the act of the queen_)

My difficulties as to the _Folio_ reading are--why the earth should be
so described without immediate contrast with the sky; and--how the earth
could be showing a tristful visage, and the sickness of its thought. I
think, if the Poet indeed made the alterations and they are not mere
blunders, he must have made them hurriedly, and without due attention. I
would not forget, h