is he had found from his
childhood in the sovereign virtues of the King and Queen. So that his
criticism in these earlier days was but the fastidiousness of love, that
disparages all other excellence in comparison with its own ideal; his
philosophy was a disallowance of all other reality; and his negations
only defined and brightened his faith. Doubt, question and speculation,
mystery and anomaly, the illusions of sense, the instability of natures,
all that was irrational in life, with its certainties of logic and
hazards of chance, all that was unproven in religion, dubious in
received opinion, obscure in the destiny of man, were but glimpses of a
larger unity, vistas of truth unexplored.

Hamlet's thinking is always marked by that quality of penetration into
and through the thoughts of others, that is called free-thinking. The
discovery, as he moved in the spiritual world of established ideas and
settled doctrines, apparently immovable, that they were of the same
stuff as his own thoughts--were pliant and yielding, and could be
readily unwoven by the logic that wove them, would tempt him to move and
displace, and build and construct, until he might have a collection of
opinions large enough to be termed a philosophy. But it would be
gathered rather in the joy of intellectual activity, realizing its own
energy, and ravelling up to its own form the woof of other minds, than
with any practical bearing on life. All this was a work in another
sphere--

"of no allowance to his bosom's truth."

The light of a sovereign manhood and womanhood was reflected on the
world around him, and afar on the world of thought---their greatness
reconciled all the contradictions of life. And in pure submission to
their control all the various activities of his versatile nature, its
irony and its earnestness, its shrewdness and its fancy, its piety and
its free-thinking, harmonized like sweet bells not yet jangled or
untuned. He lived at peace with all, in fellowship with all; he could
rally Polonius without malice, and mimic Osric without contempt.

It is plain that Hamlet looked forward to a life of activity under his
father's guidance. He was no dreamer--we hear of "the great love the
general gender bear him," and the people are not fond of dreamers. In
truth, the Germans have had too much their own way with Hamlet, and have
read into him something of their own laboriousness and phlegm. But
Hamlet was more of a poet than a professor