winter's cold, which, however bitter, certainly leads into the genial spring.

Meanwhile, we cannot but feel, as Hamlet plainly does, that in spite of all, there is something touching in the Queen's unaffected love to her child: only contrast the King's hollow

For your intent

In going back to school in Wittenberg,
It is most retrograde to our desire :
And we beseech you, bend you to remain
Here, in the cheer and comfort of our eye,
Our chiefest courtier, cousin, and our son :—

with the queen's

Let not thy mother lose her prayers, Hamlet;

I pray thee, stay with us; go not to Wittenberg.

At the same time it cannot be pretended that this affection, natural as it is, is much more than the instinct which the female of the genus homo has in common with the cow and the hen: the instinct of the human animal, rather than the affection of the woman's spiritual and immortal being. For the queen is one of those women, but too common now and always, whose proper humanity has been but little awakened and developed, though all the forms and movements of her life may have the delicate impress and graceful appearance of it. She seemed a worthy wife of her first husband; but she merely reflected without partaking of his virtues, and when his presence was withdrawn, the polished, but vacant, mirror was equally ready to reflect any inferior personage. I always compare her with Dr. Johnson's Mrs. Thrale, as we become acquainted with her in Boswell, and see her a beautiful and untameable butterfly-appreciating and enjoying (as it seemed) the grave morality and wisdom of Johnson's friendship as long as her name, and her reflected nature, were Thrale; and revolting from it, and utterly breaking it off as an intolerable yoke when, after Thrale's death, she became in mind, as well as by name, Piozzi.

HAMLET AT WITTENBERG.

33

The King, with fresh hypocrisies on his lips, goes to drown his conscience in draughts of Rhenish, and Hamlet is left alone, to give full vent to his feelings :

O, that this too too solid flesh would melt,
Thaw, and resolve itself into a dew!

Or that the Everlasting had not fix'd

His canon 'gainst self-slaughter! O God! O God!
How weary, stale, flat, and unprofitable

Seems to me all the uses of this world!

Fye on 't! O fye! 'tis an unweeded garden,

That grows to seed; things rank and gross in nature,
Possess it merely.

Upon these lines Coleridge remarks, "This tædium vitæ is a common oppression on minds cast in the Hamlet mould, and is caused by disproportionate mental exertion, which necessitates exhaustion of bodily feeling. Where there is a just coincidence of external and internal action, pleasure is always the result; but where the former is deficient, and the mind's appetency of the ideal is unchecked, realities will seem cold and unmoving." I have already pointed out the importance of the introduction of Wittenberg, on account of the influence of a collegiate life in developing this meditative tendency of Hamlet's mind: if any reader of commentators has been disturbed by the objection of one of them, that Hamlet is in this scene represented as a youth talking of going back to school, I would remind such, that at that great outburst of devotion to letters and philosophy which accompanied the Reformation, and both created, and fostered into almost instant maturity, the universities of Northern Europe (and this very Wittenberg among the rest), it was not only youths who thronged to drink and bathe in the streams of knowledge, but also men of mature age, and fighting knights and barons, as well as priests and civilians.* Let us note too

* See D'Aubigné's account of Hutten and Sickingen, and of the enthusiasm for letters among the knights and nobles, elder contemporaries of Luther. Hist. Ref. Liv. I. § 7, 9.

D

the propriety of Hamlet being a Dane, and not, like so many of Shakspeare's other heroes, an Italian: not only has the North always been, as it still is, the land of deep inward meditation, the South that of joyous outward sensation, but the northmen are marked by that irresolute, hesitating, and over-thoughtful dread of committing themselves to action, and that brave, practical energy, when committed, which characterize the conduct of Hamlet.*

Not to be tedious, I abstain from quoting the rest of Hamlet's speech, and only assure the reader, that he ought to find in it satisfactory proof of the truth of what I have hitherto said of Hamlet and of his mother.

:

6

Then enter Horatio and the two officers, to tell Hamlet of the Ghost. He receives them with the quiet easy courtesy of a gentleman and a prince :-to Marcellus, whom he knew slightly, I am very glad to see you,'to Bernardo, a stranger, Good even, Sir,'-while to Horatio he expresses surprise, and the real pleasure of unexpectedly seeing his old college friend at Elsinore. Horatio's speeches in the first scene had told us that he was a Dane, and well acquainted with the politics of the country but we now learn from Hamlet's conversation with him in this and the next scene, that he was no courtier, that it was a strange thing to see him at the court, and that he was unacquainted with its private habits and customs. The habitual sobriety and steadiness of his character are recognized, in Hamlet's quick protest against the possibility of a truant disposition having brought his friend to Elsinore, and in the playful threat 'We'll teach you to drink deep ere you depart.' The deep irony hid under these light words, shows itself more plainly in the following, Thrift, thrift, Horatio!'-and

Robertson, more than once, insists upon this feature in the German character, and shows its political consequences: and especially in the career of the unfortunate Elector of Saxony, who was as irresolute in council as brave in battle. The newspapers are daily giving us new instances.

then Hamlet falls quite back into the train of thought from which the entrance of Horatio had roused him :My father-Methinks I see my father!

adding, in reply to the hurried question of Horatio,* whose mind is full of the fearful appearance he is about to tell of, mind's eye, Horatio.

In my

Here we see the preparation of Hamlet's mind for the appearance of his father's spirit: he already, in his abstract brooding moods, saw him in his mind's eye. And let me not-at least till I have been heard out-be condemned as paradoxical, when I say that I believe the Ghost will be best understood by considering, that it is in his mind's eye rather than with the bodily organ that Hamlet afterwards sees the vision itself. When Hamlet returned to Denmark from Wittenberg on the sudden death of his father, he would naturally have heard that his father was found dead in his garden, with all the appearances of having been poisoned, as was supposed, by a serpent, and that his brother had either been the person to find him, or the one last seen near the place : he had found that brother already elected to the throne

* Mr. Knight has printed the passage, no doubt judiciously restoring it from the folio,

Ham. My father, Methinks I see my father.
Hor.

My lord?

O where

The previous modern editions omitted the 'O,' thinking they thereby improved the metre. But, as Coleridge has elsewhere pointed out, these variations of the regular number of syllables show the greatest art in the structure of the verse, and the finest ear for rythm. Only let them be read or spoken with the right emphasis, and we have an harmonious union of sense and sound, which no measuring of syllables on the fingers could have given. Thus, here, that hypercatalectic 'O,' marks the abruptness with which Horatio breaks in upon Hamlet, beginning before he had quite finished, in his surprise at what sounds like an assertion that he is actually seeing the spirit he had come to tell him of. Thus, too, we are compelled to make a pause, corresponding to Hamlet's abstract brooding mood at the moment, after 'My father:'-the second, and, to the mere scansion of the verse, superfluous syllable of the word 'father,' makes it necessary to drop the voice for a moment, and to recommence as if with a fresh line. A succession of pauses are marked in this way in Hamlet's late soliloquy. Another kind of pause is often made by the omission of a syllable in the measure, which renders it necessary for the speaker to supply its place by dwelling long upon the syllable which immediately precedes the gap.

instead of himself, who had always been looked upon as the next in succession; married to his mother; and receiving him with the unaccustomed, and evidently most unnatural and affected, protestations and caresses, which could not conceal from Hamlet's keen eye the hatred and guilty fear that lurked beneath. The Ghost merely reinforms him of some of these circumstances, and adds as a fact that which Hamlet's exclamation-'O my prophetic soul, my uncle!'-shows that he had already arrived at as an inference deduced from the other points. And not only does the Ghost tell him nothing that he was not, just at the moment of its communication, beginning to perceive by force of his own reasonings, but he does not trust to the evidence of the former, except just in the same degree as he does to the conclusions of the latter; and the one like the other he requires to be confirmed (as he does confirm it by the scheme of the play) before he decides on avenging his father's death, as the Ghost enjoins him to do. The Ghost then, I believe, must be understood as the embodying of Hamlet's own dreamy thoughts into an image, which,-projected upon the dark mists which rise before the future hopes of his life, while the sun of the past has just sunk below the horizon*-seems to him a visible spectre, presenting itself to the senses as well as to the mind. Hamlet is exactly in the state of mind in which men did see ghosts, until the accurate physical science, and superficial incredulity, of the 18th century, had combined to banish them from the earth: he has no doubt of its actual appearance, he is convinced that it is as present to his senses as to his

"The curious optical phenomenon called the Spectre of the Brocken, is very rare, requiring a combination of circumstances to produce it. If tabular mists happen to rise in the east about sunset, and present a perpendicular face, the shadow of the mountain is reflected against it, as it were against a wall of gigantic dimensions. The inn then becomes a palace in size, and the human beings appear giants." I hope I need not tell the reader where he may find the original employment of this illustration, which I have followed.