Page:Wit, humor, and Shakspeare. Twelve essays (IA cu31924013161223).pdf/348

 of sensibility; so, when she enters in the first mad scene, entirely insensible to her misfortune, it both increases our sadness and calls upon us to create what should be her sane feeling. When that is done, the songs borrow all the chasteness of misfortune. We are absorbed in sorrow to see how distraction could violate her sacred privacy: thinking more of that than of the words, the coarseness eludes us. We are all bound up in the brother's feeling at this sight, who cries,—

"O rose of May! Dear maid, kind sister, sweet Ophelia!"

And the King says, "How do you, pretty lady?" Yes, that she is, through it all. If she had her wits, and were using them to persuade us to revenge her, it could not move like these piteous, tender improprieties.

"Thought and affliction, passion, hell itself, She turns to favor and to prettiness."

For she sings without smirching a single petal of the daisies and pansies, which she so softly distributes, with such an appeal of forlornness, to bid their fragrance disinfect her language, or to speak for her in the natural key of her wonted maidenhood. So every heart exhales in the pity that plays the magic of distance and softens the unsightliness of her ruin.

Shakspeare has given most touchingly rational applications to her distribution of the flowers. The flowers themselves are culled in fancy: she holds no actual nosegay in her hand. She recalls, together with the long-unheeded songs, all that she learned in girlhood about