As honour, love, obedience, troops of friends,

I must not look to have; but in their stead,

Curses, not loud, but deep, mouth-honour, breath

Which the poor heart would fain deny, but dare not.”

He finds that he has been paltered with by the double senses of sorcery. The sea of blood is sweeping him onward, helpless and hopeless; for its red tide has washed out, one by one, the promises which witchcraft had written upon sand.

Throughout this drama, one of its most remarkable impressions is, that we retain, not, indeed, a sympathy, but a pity for the ruin of the hero. It is a feeling wholly different from the unhealthy admiration excited in a vicious school of sentimental romance for its worthless personages. Shakspeare has never suffered the interest in the character of Macbeth to be wholly extinguished, and, appropriately, he gives him the dignity of a soldier's death.

The moral catastrophe is more deeply laid. In the life of man there are two results of goodness and a well-poised faith which, for their impressive beauty, appear to me especially worthy of the deepest reflection: one is, that in a course of existence thus controlled, there is an unbroken continuity; the stream of life flows on in its appointed channel, leaving no ruin behind, and with a sunlight ever before. The past, the present, and the future are blended together in the mind by happy memories-a happy consciousness and the hopefulness of faith. "The thought of past years doth breed perpetual benediction,"* and there is a tranquil looking forward to the future. The

* Wordsworth's Ode on the Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood. Works, p. 387.

other result is, that familiar things are the oftener regarded as symbols of that spiritual world which gives reality to our being a feeling without which the heart sinks down in dismal and dreary despondency from its sense of hollowness, and with which the heart leaps up with the assurance of its own undying strength. Now, I have referred to these considerations because it is to the very opposite of all this that the soul of Macbeth is brought in the extremity of his career of guilt. It is that condition of mind—the lowest pitch of infidel despair-which looks on life as utterly vain and meaningless. From the innocence of his early days he feels separated by a dread gulf of crime; and, for the future, all is impenetrable darkness. This is the moral catastrophe of the tragedy, and I do not know how I can so well express these opposite conditions to which the soul may be either raised or sunk, than by citing what alone is adequate to express the emotions which accompany them-the language of poetry. The first of them-the exulting joy of a faithful, thoughtful spirit, quickly sensitive to any token which gives assurance of the covenant between things human and divine, and happy in its memory of childhood—has been expressed when a poet exclaimed—

"My heart leaps up when I behold

A rainbow in the sky:

So was it when my life began,

So is it now I am a man,

So be it when I shall grow old,

Or let me die!

The child is father of the man;

And I could wish my days to be

Bound each to each by natural piety."*

* Wordsworth's works, p. 27.

Now, by the side of this, listen to what is almost the last voice that comes from the weary soul of Macbeth :

"To-morrow, and to-morrow, and to-morrow,
Creeps in this petty pace from day to day,
To the last syllable of recorded time;
And all our yesterdays have lighted fools

The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle!

Life's but a walking shadow; a poor player,

That struts and frets his hour upon the stage,
And then is heard no more: it is a tale

Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing."

The terrors of the tragedy have subsided into this deeply pathetic strain; and, hollow as this contemplative melancholy is, it still wins from us enough of sympathy to make us feel that we are standing amid the ruins of a soul which was worthy of a better destiny.

LECTURE III.*

Hamlet.

IN passing from the tragedy of Macbeth to that of Hamlet, the transition is a very wide one. Both dramas, indeed, have their supernatural agencies-strange, spiritual things made real to the imagination; and the respective heroes are not unlike in a certain constitutional reflectiveness of mind. In the Scottish usurper, as well as in the young Danish prince, there is a touch of philosophy. But, while in the tragedy of Macbeth there is, I may almost say, a throng of supernatural forms detested and terrific-the witches, with all their train of apparitions, that rose around their cauldron, and the blood-boltered spectre of Banquo-in Hamlet there is one solitary and majestic phantom; and, instead of that lurid, supernatural light which was fitfully breaking upon the former tragedy, we seem to behold now one solemn and awful shadow hanging over the course of the drama. The meditative moods of Macbeth's mind were no more than bubbles, borne onward upon the surface of that rapid and violent tide which hurried the

* December 20th, 1842.

406

movement of the play; but in Hamlet, the philosophic habit of his intellect is the chief element in the tragedy -the ruling principle which gives to it its gentle and slow progression. Nor is this intellectual character peculiar to the chief person; for, besides the profound and feeling thoughtfulness of Hamlet, you find the insincere and declamatory reasoning of the king, the self-complacent shrewdness of the old politician in Polonius, the fraternal counsels of Laertes, and, in perfect keeping with the predominant tone of the tragedy, the logic of the captious grave-digger-a most thoughtful, reasoning company. In this respect, it seems to me that this drama, more than any other, may be regarded as eminently reflecting the constitution of Shakspeare's mind -as the production in which he incorporated, more largely than any other, the habits of his intellect.

If the question were asked-What personage in the whole range, not only of dramatic literature, but of all fiction, has gained the deepest, the most pleasing, and universal interest?—the answer, I am inclined to believe, which cultivated minds would be most apt to give, would be, The character of Hamlet. Now it would be a very shallow effort were I to seek an explanation of this deep and widespread interest in the outward story of the play, its plot and incidents and catastrophe. The mystery is not to be solved thus; something more inward must be sought to explain it-to show how it is in accordance with our common human-heartedness. Nay, more than this: it is not enough to discover in what respects this poem is illustrative and typical of the mere feelings and thoughts of humanity, for I believe that its sublime philosophy consists in this that in it we are carried into