seem only to be found in his original constitution: he is accomplished, but inactive; he meditates much, he does nothing; events agitate, but do not move him. The court is resuming its ordinary aspect, he regards it not; the state is threatened with imminent dangers, he is not stirred to action; his own wrongs excite him to no resolve, to no remonstrance, and only drive him to passionate declamation and the thoughts of getting rid of life by self-murder. Hamlet has read and thought much, has passed happy hours with Ophelia, has lived for the most part in a charmed world of imagination and sentiment; he is constitutionally deficient in that quality of a healthy brain or mind which may be termed its elasticity, in virtue of which the changes and chances of the mutable world should be sustained without damage, and in various trials steadfastness and trust still preserved. When, at thirty years of age, his first sorrow comes, and his first trial, he loses his self-possession, grows moody and misanthropical, abuses the world, denounces woman, and wishes that his material body would resolve itself into a dew. And he is about to be exposed to new and

deeper causes of disturbance, which he is undoubtedly in a very unfit state to meet.

The soliloquy is brought to an abrupt conclusion by the approach of Horatio, Bernardo, and Marcellus. They come to impart the awful secret of the last night to him. He receives them frankly and kindly, and inquires, particularly, why Horatio has left Wittenberg. After a little evasion, Horatio tells Hamlet that it was to see his father's funeral; and this replunges Hamlet into his bitterest reflections on his mother's wedding, which followed so hard upon. The intensity of his dissatisfaction is expressed in his exclamation,

Would I had met my dearest foe in heaven
Ere I had seen that day, Horatio !—

and his thoughts wander to the recollection of that lost father, and revive in his mind his noble figure and appearance.

My father, methinks I see my father.

Horatio, full of the recollections of the past night

and of the things he has yet to utter, is startled into exclaiming, "O, where, my lord?" but recovers himself enough, when he finds that the prince only spoke figuratively, to make an observation on his remembrance of the late king's goodly and kinglike appearance. Yet he cannot suppress his thoughts much longer. His next words are,

My lord, I think I saw him yesternight.

An assertion which Hamlet is so entirely unprepared to understand that he only carelessly asks, as if wondering whom or what Horatio can be talking about,

Saw! who?

and when Horatio replies,

My lord, the king your father,

he can only bewilderingly repeat the words. And then the amazing story is told to him: how first Marcellus and Bernardo had twice been encountered in the dead waste and middle of the night by a

figure like his father, all armed, which had gone slowly and stately by them: how they had been stricken dumb with dread, so that they spoke no word to it that after they had imparted this to him (Horatio) in dreadful secresy, he had himself, incredulous of their relation, joined their watch on the third night, and with them witnessed the dread apparition. Horatio ends his description by saying

I knew your father;

These hands are not more like.

The whole of the conversation which ensues in this scene must be perused, in order to follow the slow process by which the doubting mind of Hamlet receives this strange and unnatural relation as true. Perhaps it is also indicative of the habitual mistrust and scepticism on his part which is observable in other passages. He inquires where this happened; asks if Horatio spoke to the apparition; and when told that he did, and that " answer made it none," and that it shrunk away as the morning cock crew, the frightful particulars perplex him, and the working

of his inward mind is but shown in the mere won

dering expression, ""Tis very strange :"

to which

Horatio rejoins,

As I do live, my honoured lord, 'tis true.

Hamlet then inquires concerning the persons who are to form the watch on the ensuing night, and finds that they are to be the same. His questioning, however, is still tinged with manifest doubting; and this part of the conversation, relative to minute particulars of the figure of which Horatio had spoken, sometimes misunderstood, indicates both the hold the story had taken of him, and a kind of desire to disprove that the appearance could have been that of his father.

HAM. Indeed, indeed, sirs, but this troubles me. Hold you the watch to-night?

HOR. O, yes, my lord; he wore his beaver up.

Then saw you not his face?