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196 not dead—he that spoke to you so sweetly, as his heart overflowing with adoration bade him speak—and he will be with you in thought forever, even though he disappear.”

The killing of Ophelia is the most useless and the most monstrous of all the cruelties of Hamlet. I cannot understand how a single soul can have forgiven him for this. His rambling frenzy at her tomb does not suffice to obliterate the crime. She, at least, was pure and innocent; yet through the fault of him who loved her there came to her the greatest unhappiness and the most unjust fate. To her, the one pure being, the one innocent heart—and her only fault was that she had trusted love!

The other persons of the drama are as incoherent as the Prince. Claudius is at heart a cowardly moralist who sins through blindness and terror—yet knows that he is sinning, and is capable of remorse. Gertrude is still more inexplicable. Either she was so wicked as to have formed the resolve to be the accomplice and wife of the assassin—and in that case one cannot understand her dismay at the first harsh words of Hamlet—or she was at heart weak and affectionate—and in that case one cannot understand