See you now;

Your bait of falsehood takes this carp of truth:

And thus do we of wisdom and of reach,

With windlaces, and with assays of bias,
By indirections find directions out;

So, by my former lecture and advice,

Shall you my son: you have me, have you not?

Scarcely has Polonius completed his wary injunctions and dismissed Reynaldo when, suddenly, Ophelia rushes in, and in a state so expressive of alarm as to frighten him. The reason of her alarm is that she has just had offered to her the most painful spectacle that can be presented to any human eye; that of one dearly loved, seen for the first time after having become bereft of reason. In such a state Hamlet has just been seen by her; the individual form and features the same, but the governing mind changed or gone.

Alas for Hamlet! After that wretched night-watch, fresh griefs had awaited him. His letters to Ophelia have been repelled, his access to her has been denied. To write to her, and to hear her gentle voice, might have soothed him in his great distraction; and the solace has been forbidden. We cannot doubt that

after the disturbance of the ghost-scene, Hamlet had gathered some hope of comfort from reviving thoughts of Ophelia and of her true affection: that, at least, was left in his troubled heart. Of this hope he found himself rudely deprived, abruptly, and unexpectedly. Of the misery in which his days and nights have since been passed we now gather incidental information. We learn, not from actual detail of what may have had few witnesses, but of direct inference from what is described to us by an affrighted spectator of his present condition, how the interval has really been passed, and with what visible ravage of the mind and of the body also. Perhaps we gather that these later troubles, mingling with his former impressions of the frailty of woman, have taken an ascendancy over his deeper grief, and that vexation, and melancholy, and fastings, and unrest, have been combined and have done their work upon him. Ophelia's relation of what she has witnessed tells us all. She has rushed into the presence of her startled father :

Enter OPHELIA.

POL. How now, Ophelia? what's the matter?

OPH. Alas, my lord, I have been so affrighted!
POL. With what, in the name of heaven?

OPH. My lord, as I was sewing in my chamber,
Lord Hamlet,—with his doublet all unbrac'd;
No hat upon his head; his stockings foul'd,
Ungarter'd, and down-gyved to his ancle;
Pale as his shirt; his knees knocking each other,
And with a look so piteous in purport,

As if he had been loosed out of hell,

To speak of horrors, he comes before me.

Polonius hastily interrupts this singular narrative: he has drawn his conclusions already. Being ignorant of any other causes likely to transform Hamlet in such an extraordinary manner, he accounts for it in his own way :

POL. Mad for thy love?
ОРН.

But, truly, I do fear it.

POL.

My lord, I do not know;

What said he ?

OPH. He took me by the wrist, and held me hard;

Then goes he to the length of all his arm ;

And, with his other hand thus, o'er his brow,

He falls to such perusal of my face,

As he would draw it. Long stay'd he so ;

At last,

‚—a little shaking of mine arm,
And thrice his head thus waving up and down,—

He raised a sigh so piteous and profound,

That it did seem to shatter all his bulk,

And end his being. That done, he lets me go:
And, with his head over his shoulder turn'd,
He seem'd to find his way without his eyes;
For out o' doors he went without their help,
And to the last, bended their light on me.

It can hardly be imagined, by any woman or man of ordinary sensibility, after reading this description with attention, that it represents a scene of mere acting on the part of the afflicted prince. Surely it depicts him as the cruel meditations of many days or many weeks have left him; not acting, but suffering. The supposition that he has only been making an experiment on the feelings and fears of Ophelia cannot be entertained without depriving Hamlet of our interest, and the whole story of our sympathy. That some weeks must have passed since his interview with the ghost, is evident; as such a period, at least, must have intervened between the departure of Laertes, who set out on his travels on the day preceding it, and the conversation of Polonius with Reynaldo when he sends his son letters and money. During this period we presently learn that Hamlet's general behaviour has been so singular as to attract observation; that he

has manifested many signs of derangement of mind, some indicative of extreme distraction, and some which could not by their nature be feigned. Upon this has followed his wild behaviour before Ophelia: he would seem, after some watchful night, wherein, in dreams, the dreadful secrets not to be told to ears of flesh and blood had been horribly imagined, and when the day has brought no refreshment to his mind, to have wandered from the palace to the house of Polonius, with some vague purpose of seeing Ophelia and of satisfying his mind as to the reality of her having deserted him. In this miserable mood all his toilet is uncared for, and he is regardless of time, and place, and ceremony, and his own dignity, and his strange exposure to vulgar notice. The sight of her, sewing in her quiet chamber, may have interrupted even more terrible thoughts, for we know that he has been revolving thoughts of murder and revenge, and of self-murder and escape from life. His long perusal of her face, his action, his piteous sigh, his mode of leaving her, reveal the conflict in his mind; the painful doubt, perhaps the reproach, but more than all the sadness of a heart-broken man, even