from the sight of an outward object, but from the beholder's reflection upon it; not from the sensuous impression, but from the imaginative reflex. Few have seen a celebrated waterfall without feeling something akin to disappointment: it is only subsequently that the image comes back full into the mind, and brings with it a train of grand or beautiful associations. Hamlet feels this; his senses are in a trance, and he looks upon external things as hieroglyphics."

This is certainly very noble criticism; and our main ground of doubt as to the view thus given is, that Hamlet seems bold, energetic, and prompt enough in action, when his course is free of moral impediments; as, for instance, in his conduct on shipboard, touching the commission, where his powers of thought all range themselves under the leading of a most vigorous and steady will. Our own belief is, though we are far from absolute in it, that the Poet's design was, to conceive a man great, perhaps equally so, in all the elements of character, mental, moral, and practical; and then to place him in such circumstances, bring such motives to bear upon him, and open to him such sources of influence and reflection, that all his greatness should be morally forced to display itself in the form of thought, even his strength of will having no practicable outlet but through the energies of the intellect. A brief review of the delineation will, if we mistake not, discover some reason for this belief.

Up to the time of his father's death, Hamlet's mind, busied in developing its innate riches, had found room for no sentiments towards others but generous trust and confidence. Delighted with the appearances of good, and shielded by his rank from the naked approaches of evil, he had no motive to pry through the semblance into the reality of surrounding characters. The ideas of princely elevation and moral rectitude, springing up simultaneously in his mind, had intertwisted their fibers closely together. While the chaste forms of young imagination had kept his own heart pure, he had framed his conceptions of oth

ers according to the model within himself. To the feelings of the son, the prince, the gentleman, the friend, the scholar, had lately been joined those of the lover; and his heart, oppressed with its own hopes and joys, had breathed forth its fulness in "almost all the holy vows of heaven." In his father he had realized the ideal of character which he aspired to exemplify. Whatsoever noble images and ideas he had gathered from the fields of poetry and philosophy, he had learned to associate with that venerated name. To the throne he looked forward with hope and fear, as an elevation for diffusing the blessings of a wise sovereignty, and receiving the homage of a grateful submission. As the crown was elective, he regarded his prospects of attaining it as suspended on the continuance of his father's life, till he could discover in himself such vir-" tues as would secure him the succession In his father's death, therefore, he lost the mainstay of both his affections and his pretensions.

Notwithstanding, the foundations of his peace and happiness were yet unshaken. The prospects of the man were perhaps all the brighter, that those of the prince had faded. The fireside and the student's bower were still open to him; truth and beauty, thought and affection, had not hidden their faces from him: with a mind saddened, but not diseased, his bereavement served to deepen and chasten his sensibilities, without untuning their music. Cunning and quick of heart to discover and appropriate the remunerations of life, he could compensate the loss of some objects with a more free and tranquil enjoyment of such as remained. In the absence of his father, he could concentrate upon his mother the feelings hitherto shared between them; and, in cases like this, religion towards the dead comes in to heighten and sanctify an affection for the living. Even if his mother too had died, the loss, however bitter, would not have been baleful to him; for, though separated from the chief objects of love and trust and reverence, he would still have retained those sentiments themselves unimpaired. It is not his mother, how

ever, but his faith in her, that he has to part with. To his prophetic soul, the hasty and incestuous marriage brings at once conviction of his mother's infidelity, and suspicion of his uncle's treachery, to his father. (Where he has most loved and trusted, there he has been most deceived. The sadness of bereavement now settles into the deep gloom of a wounded spirit, and life seems rather a burden to be borne than a blessing to be cherished. Int this condition, the appearance of the Ghost, its awful disclosures, and more awful injunctions, confirming the suspicion of his uncle's treachery, and implicating his mother in the crime, complete his desolation of mind.

Nevertheless, he still retains all his integrity_and_uprightness of soul. In the depths of his being, even below

the reach of consciousness, there lives the instinct and impulse of a moral law with which the injunction of the Ghost stands in direct conflict. What is the quality of the act required of him? Nothing less, indeed, than to kill at once his uncle, his mother's husband, and his king; and this, not as an act of justice, and in a judicial manner, but as an act of revenge, and by assassination! How shall he justify such a deed to the world? How vindicate himself from the very crime thus revenged? For, as he cannot subpoena the Ghost, the evidence on which he must act is in its nature available only in the court of his own conscience. To serve any good end either for himself or for others, the deed must so stand in the public eye, as it does in his own; else he will, in effect, be setting an example and precedent of murder, not of justice.

Thus Hamlet's conscience is divided, not merely against his inclination, but against itself. However he multiplies to himself reasons and motives for the deed, there yet springs up, from a depth in his nature which reflection has not fathomed, and overruling impulse against it. So that we have the triumph of a pure moral nature over temptation in its most imposing form, the form of a sacred call from heaven, or what is such to him. He thinks he ought to do the thing, resolves that he will do

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it, blames himself for not doing it; but there is a power within him which still outwrestles his purpose. In brief, the trouble lies not in himself, but in his situation; it arises from the impossibility of translating the outward call of duty into a free-moral impulse; and until so translated he cannot perform it; for in such an undertaking he must act from himself, not from another.

This strife of incompatible duties seems the true source of Hamlet's practical indecision. His moral sensitiveness, shrinking from the dreadful mandate of revenge, throws him back upon his reflective powers, and sends him through the abysses of thought in quest of a reconciliation between his conflicting duties, that so he may shelter either the performance of the deed from the reproach of irreligion, or the non-performance from that of filial impiety. Moreover, on reflection he discerns something in the mandate that makes him question its source: even his filial reverence leads him first to regret, then to doubt, and finally to disbelieve, that his father has laid on him such an injunction. It seems more likely that the Ghost should be a counterfeit, than that his father should call him to such a deed. Thus his mind is set in quest of other proofs. But when, by the stratagem of the play, he has made the King's guilt unkennel itself, this demonstration again arrests his hand, because his own conscience is startled into motion by the revelations made from that of another. Seeking ground of action in the workings of remorse, the very proofs, which to his mind would justify the inflicting of death, themselves spring from something worse than death.

And it should be remarked, withal, that by the very process of the case he is put in immediate contact with supernatural influences. The same voice that calls him to the undertaking also unfolds to him the retributions of futurity. The thought of that eternal blazon, which must not be to ears of flesh and blood, entrances him in meditation on the awful realities of the invisible world; so that, while nerved by a sense of the duty, he is at the same time

shaken by a dread of the responsibility. Thus the Ghost works in Hamlet a sort of preternatural development: its disclosures bring forth into clear apprehension some moral ideas which before were but dim presentiments in him. It is as if he were born into the other world before dying out of this. And what is thus developed in him is at strife with the injunction laid upon him.

Thus it appears, that Hamlet is distracted with a purpose which he is at once too good a son to dismiss, and too good a man to perform. Under an injunction with which he knows not what to do, he casts about, now for excuses, now for censures, of his nonperformance; and religion still prevents him from doing what filial piety reproves him for leaving undone. Not daring to abandon the design of killing the King, he is yet morally incapable of forming any plan for doing it: he can only go through the work, as indeed he does at last, under a sudden frenzy of excitement, caused by some immediate provocation; not so much acting, as being acted upon; rather as an instrument of Providence than as a self-determining agent.

Properly speaking, then, Hamlet, we think, does not lack force of will. In him, will is strictly subject to reason and conscience; and it rather shows strength than otherwise in refusing to move in conflict with them. We are apt to measure men's force of will only by what they do, whereas the true measure thereof often lies rather in what they do not do. On this point, Mr. E. P. Whipple suggests, that "will is a relative term; and, even admitting that Hamlet possessed more will than many who act with decision, the fact that his other powers were larger in proportion justifies the common belief, that he was deficient in energy of purpose." But this, it strikes us, does not exactly meet the position; which is, that force of willis shown rather in holding still, than in moving, where the moral understanding is not satisfied; and that Hamlet seems to lack rather the power of seeing what he ought to do, than of doing what he sees to be right. The question is, whether the peculiarity of this representation is not meant to consist in