Page:Wit, humor, and Shakspeare. Twelve essays (IA cu31924013161223).pdf/356

 Then, too late for her, but not for us, to atone for her chariness of language and action, all her gifted simplicity is revealed to justify the silent past and to ennoble Hamlet for his heart's choice of such an un-*ambitious soul. What freighted her might have kept Hamlet riding on a steady keel upon any ocean that was not phantom-haunted. Death casts up her freight underneath the cliffs of this stern tragedy, and we are wreckers all along the shore to recover strays from the sail that love had chartered.

When the procession enters the churchyard, Hamlet steps aside to be unperceived. There is not a trait in this scene which does not illustrate Ophelia's character, and reflect a tender worth upon it. Hamlet wonders who it is, what person of estate whom they follow, "and with such maimèd rites." When Laertes steps forward, Hamlet praises him to Horatio. This deepens our feeling of his unconsciousness that it is a brother who is burying that beloved sister. 'Tis our common fashion of noting, with slightly raised sympathy, the mourners in a train that bears away nothing particularly dear to us. "What ceremony else?" Nothing more: the stubborn old priest will not venture his own salvation on another word for her whose "death was doubtful." Where he got that notion does not appear in the play. It is like Malcolm's crotchet that Lady Macbeth took herself off "by self and violent hands." But notions are the sheet-anchors of formalists. The priest drops his, swings round, and becomes immovable. He complains, with the whine of a man who has been imposed upon,