Page:The Psychology of Shakespeare.pdf/65

50 That it should, by being so overwrought, Suddenly strike on a sharper sense For a shell, or a flower, little things

Which else would have been past by And now I remember, I,

When he lay dying there, I noticed one of his many rings, (For he had many, poor worm,) and thought It is his mother's hair.”

When the mind is wrought to an excessive pitch of emotion, the instinct of self-preservation indicates some lower mode of mental activity as the one thing needful. When Lear's passions are wrought to the utmost, he says, “I’ll do! I'll do! I'll do!” But he does nothing. Had he been able, like Hamlet, to have taken out his note-book, it would have been good for his mental health.

Mark

the

effect of the restraint which

º

Hamlet is thus able to put upon the tornado of his emotion.

When the friends rejoin him, he is self-possessed enough swiftly to turn their curiosity aside. Horatio, indeed, remarks on his manner of doing so, and on his expression of the inten tion, for his own poor part, to go pray: “These are but wild and whirling words, my lord.” oubtless the excitement of manner would make them appear be more deserving of this comment than they do in ading. Yet Hamlet knows thoroughly, well what he is out, and proceeds to swear his friends to secrecy on his

word.

The flippant comments on the awful underground

º of the Ghost “the fellow in the cellarage,” “old mole,” “truepenny,” are another meeting point of the sublime and the ridiculous, or rather a voluntary refuge in the trivial from

the awful presence of the terrible. They are thoroughly true to the laws of our mental being. How often have men gone out of life upon the scaffold with a jest upon their lips. Even the just and cool-tempered Horatio, who takes fortune's buffets and rewards with equal thanks, is astounded and ter