eared lest he should dismiss the
murderer to heaven, or half-believed that his blameless father was
tormented in sulphurous flames for having endured a horrible death. But
however obscure and indefinite the religion of Hamlet may be, and partly
because it is so, and hence of universal experience, it adds reach and
depth to his struggle with the world. His soul flies out of bounds and
away in airy liberty on these excursions to the vast unknown, and
escapes at last victorious with the light through the darkness of
conscious immortality, and the lamp in his hand of "the readiness is
all." There is always a certain vacuity in the positive or realistic
treatment of passion, in which it is confined to the area of mortality,
and after a sultry strife delivered over to the mercy of its enemies.
But the world cannot so beset and beleaguer the soul as to block up the
access and passage of invisible allies, or intercept the communications
of infinite strength and infinite charity, or follow to its distant
haunts and inaccessible refuges the migrations of thought--

"In the hoar deep to colonize."

FRANKLIN LEIFCHILD.

FOOTNOTES:

[3] "To see Lear acted, to see an old man tottering about the stage with
a walking-stick, turned out of doors by his daughters in a rainy night,
has nothing in it but what is painful and disgusting."--_Lamb's Essays._

[4] "Shakspere: His Mind and Art," p. 96.

[5] "A Study of Shakespeare," p. 166.

PANISLAMISM AND THE CALIPHATE.[6]

I use the word "Panislamism," simply because it is one of the political
catchwords of the day. The prefix _Pan_ is supposed to have some great
and terrible significance. It is not long since Europe exerted all her
power to save Islam from the jaws of Panslavism, but now that a _Pan_
has been added to Islam, it has become in its turn the bugbear of
Europe. It is even supposed that England was fighting with this new
monster, when she put down the revolution in Egypt. England could never
have so far forgotten her liberality as to take up arms against Islam,
but Panislam must be crushed by a new crusade. Such is the wondrous
power of a prefix. So far as I can understand the mysterious force of
this word, it is designed to express the idea that the scattered
fragments of the Mohammedan world have all rallied around the Caliph to
join in a new attack upon Christendom, or that they are about to do so.
There is just enough of truth in this idea to give it curr