future was still intact, his energy
unimpaired. His mother remained to him, now doubly dear and doubly
great, and with her the tradition of the past. She was, as he gathered
from her silence, like himself, retired from the world, absorbed in
grief; but he was assured of her constancy and truth. Even the kind of
distance between them in age and sex, in mind and character, was no
barrier to this sympathetic relation. She was there with the expectation
that makes heroism possible; she was there to watch, if not to further
his enterprise, and to give it lustre with her praise. We are often
quite unconscious of the commanding influence exerted on our life by
those who are least in contact with it. To be cognizant of one steadfast
and stainless soul is to have encouragement in difficulty and support in
pain. The mere knowledge of its existence is a light within the mind,
and a secret incentive to the best action. Though silent and apart, it
is the witness of what is great, and our life is always seeking to rise
within its sphere; while, by a secret transference--for souls are not
retentive of their own goodness--our standards of living and thinking
are maintained at their highest level, like water fed by a distant
spring. All this and infinitely more than this was the Queen his mother
to Hamlet. It is impossible, therefore, to measure the effect upon him
of her marriage with his uncle. The shock of it is ever fresh throughout
the play. In the third Act the whole frame of nature is still aghast at
it:--

"Heaven's face doth glow;
Yea, this solidity and compound mass,
With tristful visage, as against the doom,
Is thought-sick at the act."

And this was not only after the revelation of the Ghost, but after the
confirmation of its truth by the test Hamlet had himself applied. Even
then the first paroxysm has hardly subsided. You see the whole being
measured by it, the mind stretched to give it utterance, the world
called as a witness to its enormity:--

III.

But it is at an earlier stage of this impression, when the thought of
this profanation of the sacredness of life and the sanctity of love
chills the life-blood of his heart, and then rushes burning through it
like the shame of a personal insult, that he first stands before us in
the palace of the King. In appearance nothing is changed. He sees the
same crowd, the same obsequious attitudes, the same decorous forms; the
trumpets with their us