nmity is stayed.
He advances step by step to look closely at the ruins of mortality; to
slight the great names of kings and follow heroes to the dust. As he
sees the skull tossed out of the grave, the king is already dead to him.
"How the knave jowls it to the ground, as if it were Cain's jawbone,
that did the first murder. This might be the pate of a politician, which
this ass now o'erreaches; one that would circumvent God, might it not?"
He is not satisfied till he takes the skull in his hand, and is
sarcastic on beauty and festive wit, and the base uses to which we may
come; when, from the other side, the procession of Ophelia advances. The
grace and allurement of Ophelia had awakened in the imaginative Hamlet a
feeling stronger and warmer indeed, but of the same relation to his
capacity of loving as that of Romeo for Rosaline, and as easily lost in
the glow or shadow of a deeper passion. That it was without depth and
sacredness is plain from his delighting to ridicule and torment her
father, and from his careless and equivocal jesting with her at the
play. But though not a deep experience, it was of a quality different
from that of other life. And the death of Ophelia had gathered into one
the records of the hours of love; the first and the last; the meetings
and the partings; the gifts, and flowers, and snatches of song. On these
tender memories the hollow clamour of Laertes breaks with a discord so
intolerable that Hamlet, who had with his usual reserve received the
news of her death with the cold exclamation, "What! the fair Ophelia!"
suddenly breaks into a fury and leaps into her grave.

* * * * *

In this study of Hamlet in relation to the ghost-story, we have seen
that the effect, both of the first recital and of its subsequent
confirmation, was to whet his mind against his mother; and that the
passages in which this is expressed are among the _final touches_ of the
master; that the deed of revenge is only flashed upon him from without;
and that, in the intervals between such awakenings of memory, he
relapses to the thought-sickness of the first soliloquy; that on the
only occasion when the bitterness of his sorrow leads him to meditate
self-destruction, there is no question of the ghost, the murder, or the
king; that the only ungovernable bit of fury is in the presence of his
mother; and that from this scene the drama is developed, and the final
catastrophe ensues.

V.

S