Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 17.djvu/77

 burdens." In Hamlet's description of himself to Guildenstern, where he says he "has lost all his mirth," and so forth, it is still the dejection of his mind which he puts forward: he does not pretend to excite sympathy by pointing to his failing body. So in his complimentary address to Horatio, who appears to him to be so fortunately endowed, physically and mentally, he recognizes in his friend that favorable constitution where the blood and will power are so equably adjusted that they "are not a pipe for Fortune's finger to sound what stop she please." In other words, Horatio was seen to possess what the speaker was conscious of lacking, a constitution in which the body is subordinate to the will, a temperament which Hamlet had not, but quite the reverse—in which the will was dominated by the body. This he vaguely feels but can not explain, and so he soliloquizes:

except that he was a "muddy-metalled rascal"; but we perceive clearly enough that it was not his brain but his body which was muddy-metalled.

Again, he evidently feels the drag-anchor of his heavy mold, and the consequent ill-cooperation of his bodily frame with his discerning spirit, when even under great excitement he stops to explain that he "is not splenetic and rash," though yet there is a sort of ground-swell of "something dangerous" in him. Yes, dangerous if sufficiently aroused; but his was a kind of nature which could endure a great deal of arousing before it culminated in action. When he takes his leisurely walk in the hall this quiet exercise goes under no other name with him than a "breathing-time"; and, once familiarized with his true physical picture, how apt appears his reply to Osric: "Sir, I will walk here in the hall; if it please his Majesty, this is the breathing-time of day with me."

When he apologizes to Laertes, he says, "You must needs have heard how I am punished with a sore distraction." He says "heard," because he is conscious that there is nothing in his appearance to indicate failing health, and this under the circumstances he would scarcely have omitted had he lost any of his superfluous flesh. He was himself a keen observer of physiological peculiarities, was ready enough to detect changes in the personal appearance of others, and therefore would have been thoroughly conscious of his own had any marked falling away taken place. Notice his reception of the players. One he addresses thus:

And to her who is to play the Queen—