health. Suddenly, conscience-smitten, he sees the ghost of the murdered man; for this phantom, which Shakspeare summons, is not a mere stage-trick: we feel that here the supernatural is unnecessary, and that Macbeth would create it, even if hell would not send it. With muscles twitching, dilated eyes, his mouth half open with deadly terror, he sees it shake its bloody head, and cries with that hoarse voice which is only to be heard in maniacs' cells:

"Prithee, see there!

Why, what care I?

Behold! look! lo! how say you?
If thou canst nod, speak too.
If charnel-houses and our graves must send
Those that we bury back, our monuments
Shall be the maws of kites. . . .

Blood hath been shed ere now, i' the olden time,
Ay, and since too, murders have been perform'd
Too terrible for the ear: the times have been,
That, when the brains were out, the man would die,
And there an end; but now they rise again,

With twenty mortal murders on their crowns,
And push us from our stools: . .

Avaunt! and quit my sight! let the earth hide thee !
Thy bones are marrowless, thy blood is cold;
Thou hast no speculation in those eyes

Which thou dost glare with!"1

His body trembling like that of an epileptic, his teeth clenched, foaming at the mouth, he sinks on the ground, his limbs writhe, shaken with convulsive quiverings, whilst a dull sob swells his panting breast, and dies in his swollen throat. What joy can remain for a inan beset by such visions? The wide dark country, which he surveys from his towering castle, is but a field of 1 Macbeth, iii. 4.

death, haunted by ominous apparitions; Scotland, which he is depopulating, a cemetery,

Where ... the dead man's knell

Is there scarce ask'd for who; and good men's lives
Expire before the flowers in their caps,

Dying or ere they sicken." 1

His soul is "full of scorpions." He has "supp'd full with horrors," and the loathsome odour of blood has disgusted him with all else. He goes stumbling over

the corpses which he has heaped up, with the mechanical and desperate smile of a maniac-murderer. Thenceforth death, life, all is one to him; the habit of murder has placed him out of the pale of humanity. They tell him that his wife is dead:

"Macbeth. She should have died hereafter;
There would have been a time for such a word.
'To-morrow, and to-morrow, and to-morrow,
Creeps in this petty pace from day to day
To the last syllable of recorded time,
And all our yesterdays have lighted fools
The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle!
Life's but a walking shadow; a poor player
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage,

And then is heard no more: it is a tale

Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing.'

There remains for him the hardening of the heart in crime, the fixed belief in destiny. Hunted down by his enemies, "bear-like, tied to a stake," he fights, troubled only by the prediction of the witches, sure of being invulnerable so long as the man whom they have 1 Macbeth, iv. 3.

Ibid. v. 5.

described, does not appear. Henceforth his thoughts dwell in a supernatural world, and to the last he walks with his eyes fixed on the dream, which has possessed him, from the first.

The history of Hamlet, like that of Macbeth, is a story of moral poisoning. Hamlet has a delicate soul, an impassioned imagination, like that of Shakspeare. He has lived hitherto, occupied in noble studies, skilful in mental and bodily exercises, with a taste for art, loved by the noblest father, enamoured of the purest and most charming girl, confiding, generous, not yet having perceived, from the height of the throne to which he was born, aught but the beauty, happiness, grandeur of nature and humanity. On this soul, which character and training make more sensitive than others, misfortune suddenly falls, extreme, overwhelming, of the very kind to destroy all faith and every motive for action with one glance he has seen all the vileness of humanity; and this insight is given him in his mother. His mind is yet intact; but judge from the violence of his style, the crudity of his exact details, the terrible tension of the whole nervous machine, whether he has not already one foot on the verge of madness:

:

"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! God!
How weary, stale, flat and unprofitable,

Seem to me all the uses of this world!

Fie on't! ah fie! 'tis an unweeded garden,

That grows to seed; things rank and gross in nature

1 Goethe, Wilhelm Meister.

Possess it merely. That it should come to this!
But two months dead: nay, not so much, not two:
So excellent a king, . . . so loving to my mother
That he might not let e'en the winds of heaven
Visit her face too roughly. Heaven and earth!
. . . And yet, within a month,-
Let me not think on't-Frailty, thy name is woman —
A little month, or ere those shoes were old
With which she follow'd my poor father's body,
Ere yet the salt of most unrighteous tears
Had left the flushing in her galled eyes,

She married. O, most wicked speed, to post
With such dexterity to incestuous sheets!

It is not nor it cannot come to good!

But break, my heart; for I must hold my tongue !" 1

Here already are contortions of thought, a beginning of hallucination, the symptoms of what is to come after. In the middle of conversation the image of his father rises before his mind. He thinks he sees him. How then will it be when the "canonised bones have burst their cerements," "the sepulchre hath oped his ponderous and marble jaws," and when the ghost comes in the night, upon a high "platform" of land, to tell him of the tortures of his prison of fire, and of the fratricide, who has driven him thither? Hamlet grows faint, but grief strengthens him, and he has a desire for living:

And

you my sinews, grow not instant old,
But bear me stiffly up! Remember thee!
Ay, thou poor ghost, while memory holds a seat
In this distracted globe.-Remember thee?

1 Hamlet, i. 2

Yea, from the table of my memory
I'll wipe away all trivial fond records,
All saws of books, all forms, all pressures past,
And thy commandment all alone shall live.
O villain, villain, smiling, damned villain !
My tables,-meet it is I set it down,

...

...

That one may smile, and smile, and be a villain;

At least I'm sure it may be so in Denmark :
So, uncle, there you are."

"1

(writing.)

This convulsive outburst, this fevered writing hand, this frenzy of intentness, prelude the approach of a kind of monomania. When his friends come up, he treats them with the speeches of a child or an idiot. He is no longer master of his words; hollow phrases whirl in his brain, and fall from his mouth as in a dream. They call him; he answers by imitating the cry of a sportsman whistling to his falcon: "Hillo, ho, ho, boy! come, bird, come." Whilst he is in the act of swearing them to secrecy, the ghost below repeats "Swear." Hamlet cries, with a nervous excitement and a fitful gaiety:

"Ah ha, boy! say'st thou so? art thou there, truepenny? Come on-you hear this fellow in the cellarage,

Humlet. Hic et ubique? then we'll shift our ground.
Come hither, gentlemen. . . . Swear by my sword.

Ghost (beneath). Swear.

Ham. Well said, old mole! canst work i' the earth so fast? A worthy pioner ! " 2

Understand that as he says this his teeth chatter,

1 Hamlet, i. 5.

Ibid.