Nobody; I myself. Farewell; commend me to my kind lord.” Who thinks of condemning Desdemona? As Emilia says, "Oh, she was heavenly true." And yet I have seen Ophelia's answer brought forward as a proof of her weakness of character; and this weakness asserted to be the cause of Hamlet's failure, or, at least, to play an important part in the tragedy of his character. Such weakness I call strength, in the highest, most noble, because I most self-forgetting, sense of the word.

And so Ophelia, in her "weakness," fears to tell the truth, lest, in this too terrible paroxysm of madness which now possesses him, Hamlet might possibly kill her father. But this catastrophe, alas! is soon to follow, and proves to be the drop too much in her cup of lonely anguish. When Hamlet has left the scene, even then, I think, no sob is heard, no tears are shed: there is no time yet for self-pity. Her soul's agony is too deep for tears-beyond all utterance of the common kind. First in her thoughts is the "noble mind o'erthrown," and "most sovereign reason, like sweet bells jangled." At last, when she has gone through the catalogue of his rare virtues, his princely qualities, his noble attributes-all "quite, quite down"!-at the end she looks at herself-she who had "suck'd the honey of his music vows." What is left for her for her, "of ladies most deject and wretched" "Oh, woe is me! To have seen what I have seen, see what I see!" This is all she says, "still harping on " Hamlet.

In the usual stage arrangement Ophelia leaves the scene with these words. Shakespeare makes her remain; and how greatly does this heighten the pathos of her position! Her heartless father, knowing nothing, seeing nothing of the tragedy that is going on before his eyes, unconscious from first to last how deeply she has been wounded, and still treating her merely as a tool, says

"How now, Ophelia !

You need not tell us what Lord Hamlet said;

We heard it all."

He and the king had only eyes and ears for Hamlet; and so she drifts away from them into a shoreless "sea of troubles," unheeded and unmissed.

We see her once again, playing a sort of automaton part in the play-scene-sitting patiently, watchfully, with eyes only for the poor stricken one who asks to lay his head upon her lap. You notice, in the little that passes between them, how gently she treats her wayward, smitten lover. And then, having no clue to his trouble, no thread by which to link it with the past, she is scared away, with the rest, on the poisoning of Gonzago, at what appears to be a fresh outbreak of Hamlet's malady. By this time her own misery and desolation will have come home to her fully-her wounded heart, her wrecked happiness must be more than the young, unaccustomed spirit can stand up against. She is not likely, after her previous experience, to seek solace in her father's sympathy: nor is hers a nature to seek it anywhere. If found, it must come to her by the way. The queen is, by this time, wrapped up in her own griefs-inclined to confess herself to Heaven, repent what's past. Hamlet! thou hast cleft my heart in twain. . . . What shall I do?" She is grieved enough for Ophelia when she sees her "distract," but has had no time to waste a thought upon her amid her own numerous fast-growing cares-not even, as it seems, to break to her the news of her father's death. There might have been some drop of comfort, if the queen had spoken to her of Hamlet, and told her, as she told the king, "He weeps for what is done!" As it was, most likely, in the usual marvelloving way of common people, the news of Polonius's death by Hamlet's hand was conveyed to Ophelia's ears by her attendants hurriedly, without any preparation. Shock upon shock! The heart already stricken, the young brain undisciplined in life's storms, and in close and subtle sympathy with him who was her very life, she catches insensibly the infection of his mind's disease, her wits go wandering after his, and, like him, she falls down-"quite, quite down." One feels the mercifulness of this. The "sweet Heavens," to which she had appealed to help Hamlet, had helped her! Her mind, in losing memory, loses the remembrance of all the woful past, and goes back to her childhood, with its simple folk-lore and nursery-rhymes. Still, through all this, we have the indication of dimly remembered wrongs and griefs. She says she hears "there's tricks i' the

world, and hems, and beats her heart;

speaks things in

doubt, that carry but half sense: ... would make one think there might be thought, though nothing sure, yet much unhappily." But the deeper suffering-the love and grief together -cannot (perhaps never could) find expression in words. The soul's wreck, the broken heart, are seen only by Him who knows all. Happily, there is no vulgar comment made upon the deep affection which she had so silently cherished-no commonplace, pitying words. "Oh! this," says the king, "is the poison of deep grief; it springs all from her father's death." Laertes says

He comes a little nearer the truth in what follows

"Nature is fine in love: and, where 'tis fine,

It sends some precious instance of itself
After the thing it loves."

But one sees he has not the faintest insight into the real cause

of her loss of wits.

his father

The revenge he seeks upon Hamlet is for

"His means of death, his obscure funeral

No trophy, sword, nor hatchment o'er his bones,

No noble rite, nor formal ostentation

Cry to be heard, as 'twere from heaven to earth,
That I must call't in question."

A matter of family pride in Laertes, as well as grief for his father's loss. Then at her grave, he says—

"" 'Oh, treble woe

Fall ten times treble on that cursed head,

Whose wicked deed thy most ingenious sense
Deprived thee of!"

Only "when they shall meet at compt" will Hamlet even know the grief he has brought upon, the wrong he has done to, this

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deep and guileless spirit. So far as we see, he has indeed blotted her from his mind as a "trivial fond record." He is so selfcentred, so enwrapped in his own suffering, that he has no thought to waste on the delicate girl whom he had wooed with such a "fire of love," and had taught to listen to his most honeyed vows. He casts her from him like a worthless weed, without a word of explanation or a quiver of remorse. Let us hope that when he sees her grave, his conscience stings him; but beyond ranting louder than Laertes about what he would do for her sake and she dead!—there is not much sign of his love being at any time worthy of the sweet life lost for it.

so.

Perhaps you will think that, in the fulness of my sympathy for Ophelia, I feel too little for Hamlet. But this is not really One cannot judge Hamlet's actions by ordinary rules. He is involved in the meshes of a ruthless destiny, from which by nature and temperament he is powerless to extricate himself. In the infirmity of a character which expends its force in words and shrinks from resolute action, he unconsciously drags down Ophelia with him. They are the victims of the same inexorable fate. I could find much to say in explanation and in extenuation of the shortcomings of one upon whom a task was laid, which he of all men, by the essential elements of his character, was least fitted to accomplish.

But you see I only touch upon his character so far as it bears upon Ophelia, on what he has been to her and what he is. Before the story begins, he has offered her his love "in honourable fashion." Then we hear from her of the silent interview which so affrights her. After this, when for the first time we see them together, he treats her as only a madman could, and in a way which not even his affectation of madness can excuse. Again, in the play-scene which follows, the same wilfulness, even insolence,

of manner is shown to her. Now, whatever his own troubles, perplexities, heart-breaks, might be, it is hard to find an apology for such usage of one whose heart he could not but know that he had won. He is even tenderer, more considerate, to his mother, whom he thinks so wanton and so guilty, than to this young girl, whom he has "importuned with love," and "given countenance to his speech with almost all the holy vows of heaven."

I cannot, therefore, think that Hamlet comes out well in his relations with Ophelia. I do not forget what he says at her grave:

"I loved Ophelia; forty thousand brothers
Could not, with all their quantity of love,
Make up my sum!"

But I weigh his actions against his words, and find them here of little worth. The very language of his letter to Ophelia, which Polonius reads to the king and queen, has not the true ring in it. It comes from the head, and not from the heart-it is a string of euphuisms, which almost justifies Laertes' warning to his sister, that the "trifling of Hamlet's favour" is but "the perfume and suppliance of a minute." Hamlet loves, I have always felt, only in a dreamy, imaginative way, with a love as deep, perhaps, as can be known by a nature fuller of thought and contemplation than of sympathy and passion. Ophelia does not sway his whole being, perhaps no woman could, as he sways hers. Had she done so, not even the task imposed upon him by his father's spirit could have made him blot her love from his mind as a "trivial fond record," for it would have been interwoven inseparably with his soul, once and for ever.

When Ophelia comes before us for the last time, with her lap full of flowers, to pay all honour and reverence, as she thinks, in country fashion, to her father's grave, the brother is by her side, of whom she had said before, most significantly, that he should "know of it. . . . I cannot choose but weep, to think they should lay him i' the cold ground." Then that brother can lavish in her heedless ears the kind phrases, the words of love, of which, perhaps, in her past days he had been too sparing. "O rose of May! dear maid, kind sister, sweet Ophelia!" But the smiles are gone which would once have greeted these fond words. He has passed out of her memory, even as she had passed out of his, when he was "treading the primrose path of dalliance" in sunny France. She has no thought but to bury the dead-her dead love-her old father taking the outward form of it. Even the flowers she has gathered have little beauty or sweetness-"rosemary for remembrance; pray you, love, re