Page:Wit, humor, and Shakspeare. Twelve essays (IA cu31924013161223).pdf/355

 "He is dead and gone, lady, He is dead and gone; At his head a grass-green turf,  At his heels a stone. White his shroud as the mountain snow,  Larded with sweet flowers; Which bewept to the grave did go,  With true-love showers."

"We must be patient; but I cannot choose but weep to think they should lay him in the cold ground. My brother shall know of it;" and on the strength of that she culls out rosemary for him.

"They bore him bare-fac'd on the bier, And in his grave rain'd many a tear;

Fare you well, my dove!" says this loyal daughter. We echo it, but with a difference: she is this dove to whom we bid farewell. For already "in the distance one white arm is seen above the tide," clutching at the branches of a willow growing askant a brook; and our pulse premeditates the funeral strain that goes graveward while her Prince is looking "at the skull as though Death had written on it the history of man."

Poor maiden, to be churlishly suspected of making an end of herself, when we know that "an envious sliver broke" and let her into that coffin strewn with flowers,—the tributes, not to womanhood in its capacity to resolve, to outlive destiny, to outdo circumstance with patience, to contrive escapes from disaster, but simply "sweets to the sweet," turned as they were to immortal amaranths when Hamlet's breath endowed them:—

"I loved Ophelia: forty thousand brothers Could not, with all their quantity of love, Make up my sum."