How gentle the reproach:

I humbly thank you: well.

There is a coldness about the answer which deprecates more shew of feeling

OPHELIA.

My Lord, I have remembrances of yours,

That I have longéd long to re-deliver,

I pray you now receive them.

He would not have these gifts back, and takes the only, the cruel alternative:

No, not I;

I never gave you aught.

Her tearful love will have its way

My honor'd lord, you know right well, you did,
And, with them, words of so sweet breath composed,
As made the things more rich; their perfume lost,
Take these again; for to the noble mind

Rich gifts wax poor, when givers prove unkind.

Their return so works on him that it renders necessary his abrupt resumption of his mad manner, and thence the rest of the scene is but the tuneless jargon of roused philosophy—the bitter fruit of the too early repining-of the ever premature experience. Thus again he breaks the chain of his assumed part:

I did love you once.

"I did love you once." We can fancy a repetition of these words suggested, if not intended here. It is impossible for them, else, in any tone, to convey the complicated feelings torturing Hamlet's breast. There is a gentler echo of the words in his heart-a memory of the " once," in the very choice of such a word

OPHELIA

Indeed, my Lord, you made me believe so.
HAMLET. You should not have believed me
I loved you not.

OPHELIA. I was the more deceived.

Pregnant text. How many a wan face, with "old maid”— that clever, cold, mournful reproach-written on the sensitive lip and faded flush of the wronged, laughed at, and neglected: may utter these words. Epitaph of how many a young, light heart, that now lies buried for ever beneath distrust, apathy or

scorn-or in the happier grave, where the child lies shrouded in its woman's experience. We would this sacrifice had been spared. We do not see the necessity of this wrong: all our pity is for Ophelia.

But the world is full of such sacrifices, and minds as noble as Hamlet's have descended to cruelty as fatal.

He closes the scene with bitter vituperation of the sex—and this although assumed by him is sometimes the grave folly of weaker minds. Ophelia is unwounded by his sarcasm, his language is to her the unintended phrase of madness:

O what a noble mind is here o'er thrown!
The expectancy and rose of the fair state,
The glass of fashion and the mould of form,
The observed of all observers, quite, quite down!
And I, of ladies most deject and wretched,
That suck'd the honey of his music vows,
Now see that noble and most sovereign reason,
Like sweet bells jangled, out of tune and harsh,
O, woe is me

To have seen what I have seen-see what I see.

Hamlet, now treated as a madman, meets Ophelia in the Play Scene. But the matter scarcely concerns us here. There is only one thought when in solace to himself, or in enquiry of her, he answers her complaint that the Prologue is "brief," with

As Woman's love.

-

The whole world, and in truth, poor Ophelia is a sufficient reply to this. There are, it is true-here and there some-call them not Women-who link their unloving hearts with those they are to cheat with the miserable counterfeit of affection: there are those-few we incline to hope who have no love in their disposition-who go through the world with such entire and total selfishness, that scarcely a thought of promise, sympathy, or regret ruffles the butterfly gloss of their frivolous characters. But there are other that we know of, who have been Ophelias indeed, who have borne ingratitude, coldness, cruelty: contempt for the lord of their hearts, and have, unlike Ophelia, gone down to an unwept grave.

We have seen nearly all we shall see of Ophelia-heard all but her Swan-song.

The last blow has been her father's death at the hands of Hamlet.

We now see her mad-she enters dressed in her straws and flowers. All her memories-sweet or harsh-playing over her startled face and fitfully trembling over her breaking voice. And how well Shakespere understood the grief that, disturbing the fair course of thought, makes its shattered mirror, speech, but a confused and imperfect medium for it. In Ophelia's madness, as in Lear's, there is the same mixing of the shadows in the stream. In the memory of Lear, Cordelia and his poor fool are confusedly blended. In Ophelia, her father's death and her luckless love are mingled in the same way. Her first chaunt:

How shall I your true love know,

From another one,

By his cockle hat and staff

And his sandal shoon,

although addressed to the Queen, is relevant to her pilgrim, Hamlet, who has been exiled.

She passes on to the other great idea in her mind :

He is dead and gone, lady,

He is dead and gone,

At his head a grass-green turf,

At his heels a stone.

Simple as these words are, it would be impossible even to repeat them, without feeling the melancholy of their plaintive cha

racter

White his shroud as the mountain-snow

Larded all with sweet flowers;

Which bewept to the grave did go

With true-love showers.

The entrance of the King snaps the slender thread of thought -and like the uncontrolled music, glides into a lighter air, but the mournful mood returns and she leaves her friends with a deeper touch of madness than has gone before.

Her brother comes home. Once more she enters on the scene, her madness has nothing light in it now-her songs are all sad.

They bore him bare-faced on the bier;

And in his grave rain'd many a tear;

Fare you well, my dove,

And now she talks in nature's short-hand-the philosophy of flowers.

There's rosemary, that's for remembrance; pray you love,
remember and there's pansies, that's for thoughts.
There's fennel for you and colombines :-there's one
for you; and here's some for me: we may call it
herb of grace o' Sundays: you may wear yours with
a difference. There's a daisy: I would give you some
violets, but they wither'd all, when my father died:
-They say he made a good end,-

(sings) For bonny sweet robin is all my joy.

And her madness is not without its use.

The rosemary she

gives her brother, the rue she presents the Queen, carry their moral with them. And God teaches as pertinently, as pointedly in flowers as in any of his works.

Her last song-if but for the music of the words-is very, very touching.

And will he not come again?
And will he not come again?
No, no, he is dead,
Go to thy death bed,

He never will come again.

His beard was as white as snow,

All flaxen was his pole;

He is gone, he is gone,

And we cast away moan;

And peace be with his soul !

And with all Christian souls! I pray Heaven.

These sad songs have foreshadowed her fate-and we now have—and how beautifully told-the story of her death: There is a willow grows ascaunt the brook, That shows his hoar leaves in the glassy stream; There with fantastic garlands did she come, Of crow-flowers, nettles, daisies, and long purples; There on the pendent boughs her coronet weeds Clambering to hang, an envious sliver broke; When down her weeping trophies, and herself, Fell in the weeping brook.

Her body is grudgingly allowed Christian burial—we have no room or perhaps mood, as we have only seen the single mournful Portrait of Ophelia-for the wit of the grave-diggers, that relieves this sombre but sublime Drama.

We pause but in conclusion over that best of all epitaphsthe tears that hallow her green grave.

Her virgin crants,

Her maiden strewments, and the bringing home
Of bell and burial

VOL. I.

LL

NO. XII.

do not consecrate the earth like the words of Laertes:

Lay her in the earth ;

And from her fair and unpolluted flesh

May violets spring!

Or the Queen's brief thoughts as she throws her flowers in:

Sweets to the sweet: Farewell!

Her brother lingers over the grave-and pours out aloud his tide of unchecked sorrow-but a deeper mourner is at hand

What is he whose grief

Bears such an emphasis? whose phrase of sorrow
Conquers the wandering stars and makes them stand
Like wonder-wounded hearers? This is I,
Hamlet the Dane.

Laertes flies to his revenge-they are parted

HAMLET. Why I will fight with him upon this theme
Until my eyelids will no longer wag.

QUEEN. O, my son! what theme?

HAMLET. I loved Ophelia: forty thousand brothers
Could not, with all their quantity of love

Make up my sum.

The tardy avowal-which is followed by his death-is a sad, but too natural end to the Tragedy.

There is none of Shakespere's characters, excepting perhaps the gentle Desdemona, more a household God with the Reader than

NEAR Wimpfen on the Neckar, there is a small lake upon a mountain, of which the following tale is related.

A boy was once sitting on the shore of this lake playing with flowers. He was quite alone. He had often gazed on the water, and wished for a boat in which he might sail over its polished surface, but nothing but a plank, which might perhaps assist him in swimming, lay near.