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Rh In her wanderings we hear from time to time an undertone of the deepest sorrow, but never the agonised cry of fear or horror which makes madness dreadful or shocking. And the picture of her death, if our eyes grow dim in watching it, is still purely beautiful. Coleridge was true to Shakespeare when he wrote of ‘the affecting death of Ophelia,—who in the beginning lay like a little projection of land into a lake or stream, covered with spray-flowers quietly reflected in the quiet waters, but at length is undermined or loosened, and becomes a fairy isle, and after a brief vagrancy sinks almost without an eddy.’ In the remarks above I have not attempted, of course, a complete view of the character, which has often been well described; but I cannot forbear a reference to one point which I do not remember to have seen noticed. In the Nunnery-scene Ophelia’s first words pathetically betray her own feeling:

She then offers to return Hamlet’s presents. This has not been suggested to her by her father: it is her own thought. And the next lines, in which she refers to the sweet words which accompanied those gifts, and to the unkindness which has succeeded that kindness, imply a reproach. So again do those most touching little speeches: Hamlet.1 did love you once.

Ophelia. Indeed, my lord, you made me believe so.

Hamlet. You should not have believed me I loved you not.

Ophelia. 1 was the more deceived. Now the obvious surface fact was not that Hamlet had forsaken her, but that she had repulsed him; and here, with his usual unobtrusive subtlety, Shakespeare shows how Ophelia, even though she may have accepted from her elders the theory that her unkindness has driven Hamlet mad, knows within herself that she is forsaken, and cannot repress the timid attempt to win her lover back by showing that her own heart is unchanged. I will add one note. There are critics who, after all the help given them in different ways by Goethe and Coleridge and Mrs. Jameson, still shake their heads over Ophelia’s song, ‘To-morrow is Saint Valentine’s day.’ Probably they are incurable, but they may be asked to consider that Shakespeare makes Desdemona, ‘as chaste as ice, as pure as snow,’ sing an old song containing the line,