Page:The Psychology of Shakespeare.pdf/141

126 "Well, God'ield you! they say the owl was a baker's daughter. Lord, we know what we are, but know not what we may be. God be at your table!"

"You must sing, Down a-down, an you call him a-down-a. O, how the wheel becomes it! It is the false steward, that stole his master's daughter."

Compare this perfect incoherence with the apparent incoherence of Hamlet, whose replies, as Polonius observes, are often more pregnant of indirect meaning, than reason and sanity could be. There is no hidden meaning in aught that poor Ophelia says. When for a moment she wanders from her leading train of thought, the consequency of ideas is utterly lost. Even at the last, when she has fallen into the weeping brook, she has no appreciation of her danger.

Utterly lost, except to the insane train of ideas, she is as insensible to danger as a somnambulist; and singing her life away, she passes from the melody of madness to the silence of the grave. O rose of May! too soon blighted! but whose perfume shall endure in a monument of immortal words, when the tombs of Egyptian kings shall have crumbled  into the desert dust!