Page:The Psychology of Shakespeare.pdf/131

116 contrast to the being with whose fate her own was entwined, who constantly soliloquising and self-analysing, nevertheless leaves upon us the impression that we know the vast amplitude of his thoughts and feelings, but dimly and in part. The one is the translucent and limpid fountain, reflecting but one image; the other, the ever-varying river, with rapids, and smooth reaches, and profound depths, reflecting and representing the varied features of earth and Heaven.

Ophelia is passive, but not impassive; her very reticence is eloquent of feeling. Her love, like that of Imogen and Desdemona, has more of sentiment than of passion in it. It does not vent itself in strong expressions like the passions of Juliet and Cleopatra. It is imaginative, retiring, sensitive, fearful of it self, and yet without one particle of selfishness. In this, also, it is unlike the amour passion, which is essentially selfish. Not that Ophelia is wholly without passion; for love without passion cannot exist, except as a mere dream. But the constituents, sentiment and passion, which are in all love, though in infinitely varying degrees, appear in Ophelia to exist in the greatest possible amount of the former, and the least of the latter.

Sensitive, and imaginative, and devoted, the poor girl was endowed with all the faculties of moral suffering. That she should suffer greatly, undeservedly, irremediably, was needful in order to make her the object of that intense pity which the character excites; and which was certainly wanted in the drama to perfect it as a tragedy. The character is not very prominent, but it so entirely seizes upon our sympathy and pity, that, in this respect, it leavens our regard for the whole play. Ulrici has called Hamlet a "Gedankentrauerspiel," or, tragedy of thought; as if there could be any tragic emotion excited by thought alone, whose unmodified influence is to cause assent or dissent? Yet, if the character of Ophelia were wanting, there would be so much justice in the epithet which