Page:Wit, humor, and Shakspeare. Twelve essays (IA cu31924013161223).pdf/345

 Fair flower, half-drooping, half-springing from a cleft in Elsinore's grim platform, where wafts of ghostly air shudder out of the midnight of the frosty ocean, and the fate-sisters who take the breath of heroes are at hand. At length the dreadful secret mingles with her fragrance, which then comes to us distempered. She does not know what has happened; but in the sudden death and private burial of her father, slain by her own lover, she, sitting amid the relics of a rejected love, listening across the "sweet bells jangled, out of tune and harsh" of her old lover's soul-chime, intuitively feels 'that there are

"Tricks i' the world; and hems, and beats her heart; Spurns enviously at straws; speaks things in doubt, That carry but half sense."

With what a small outlay of dramatic contrivance has Shakspeare drawn the pathos of Ophelia's fate! It begins to infect us as soon as we discover that she loves; for her lover receives the visits of a murdered father. We know, but she does not, the cause of the apparent unsettling of the Prince's wits. We can anticipate into what tragedies that ghost beckons her Lord Hamlet, while she walks unconsciously so close that her garments, perfumed with rare ladyhood, brush the greaves of the grisly visitant. Her helplessness is not cast in a faint, outline against the background of these palace treacheries and lusts; but it appears in startling vividness, because she is so pure, so remote from all the wicked world, so slenderly fitted out to contend with it. Tears are summoned when we see how simple she is,