ch we hear
so much. But we find that the whole matter has dropped from his mind,
and that he has drifted back to the theme of--

"Oh! that this too too solid flesh would melt!"

It is now recast more in the tone of deliberate thought than of excited
feeling: he asks not which is best for him, but which is "nobler in the
mind,"--an impersonal, a profoundly human question, which so fascinates
our attention that we forget its irrelevance to the matter in hand or
what we assume to be the matter in hand. It is as if he had never seen
the Ghost. In his profound preoccupation he speaks of the "bourne from
which no traveller returns," and of "evils that we know not of,"
although the Ghost had told him "of sulphurous and tormenting flames."
Hamlet muses, "To sleep! perchance to dream,--ay, there's the rub," but
the Ghost had said--

"I am thy father's spirit,
Doomed for a certain term to walk the night,
And, for the day, confined to fast in fires."

It is plain that the "traveller" that had returned was not present at
all to his mental vision nor his tale remembered. In his former
meditation he had accepted the doctrine of the church; here he
interrogates the human spirit in its still place of judgment; and he
gives its verdict with a sigh of reluctance--

"Thus conscience does make cowards of us all."

Considering that this and the succeeding lines occur at the end of a
soliloquy on suicide,--that there is not only the absence of any
reference to the ghostly action, but positive proof that the subject was
not present to his thoughts, it is nothing less than astonishing that
this passage should be quoted as Hamlet's witness to his own
"irresolution." He would willingly take his own life; conscience forbids
it; therefore conscience makes us cowards: and then with a still
further generalization he announces the opposition of thought and
resolution, causing the failure of

"enterprises of great pith and moment."

Now the only enterprise on which lie was engaged--the testing of the
king's conscience--was in a fair way of success, and did, in fact,
ultimately succeed.

The scene with Ophelia that immediately follows is the development of
another theme in the first soliloquy, "Frailty! thy name is woman."
Ophelia is inseparably connected with the queen in Hamlet's mind. She is
a Court maiden, sheltered, guarded, cautioned, and, as we see in the
warnings of Polonius and Laertes, cautio