Page:Wit, humor, and Shakspeare. Twelve essays (IA cu31924013161223).pdf/180

 *ness and lifted above the necessity of feigning it, gives to every thing the complexion of the news which has revolted his moral sense,—that is, the King, his uncle, is not what he seems; his own mother's husband does not appear to be a murderer. The State of Denmark is rotten with this irony. No wonder that his brain took on the color of the leaf on which it fed. Oh, every thing is not what it appears to be, but only an indication of its opposite, and must be phrased by contradiction! He is really in love with Ophelia, but this irony conceals it. With the mood into which he has been plunged, his own love is no more worth being seriously treated than is old Polonius, whom he knows excellent well,—he is a fishmonger; that is, not that he is a person sent to fish out his secrets, as Coleridge would explain it, but that he is a dealer in staleness, and yet not so honest as those who only vend stale fish.

If we return to a period in the play which follows closely upon the scene of the taking of the oath, Ophelia herself will discover for us the turning mood in Hamlet's character. The time and action of the piece allow us to suppose that he soon went from the oath-taking to visit Ophelia. Naturally, he turned from that bloodless and freezing visitation to see life heaving in a dear bosom and reddening in lips which he had love's liberty to touch. The disclosures of the ghost had worked upon him like a turbid freshet which comes down from the hills to choke the running of sweet streams, deface with stains of mud all natural beauties, and bury with the washings of sunless defiles the mead