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to single out different elements of the same fact, and then go on to reason from a part, as from the whole. Hence, there naturally come to be various opinions respecting the same fact generalizing too hastily from the surface of things, men often arrive at contradictory conclusions, forgetting, that of a given fact, a vast many things may be true in their place and degree, yet none of them true in such sort as to hinder the truth of others. Human life is full of practical as well as speculative errors and mistakes, resulting from this partial and one-sided view of things: seizing some one principle, or being seized by it, men proceed, as they say, to carry it out; never stopping to think how it is limited and restrained on all sides by other principles. Thus men often draw a button so near the eye, as to shut out all the rest of creation, and then go smashing through the world, mistaking their own ignorance or obstinacy for conscientiousness.

Now Hamlet is undoubtedly the most complex character in dramatic literature. He is all varieties of character in one; is continually turning up a new side, appearing under a new phase, undergoing some new development; and before we can measure and map him in any one form, he has passed into another. He thus touches us at all points, surrounds us, as it were, so that great circumspection is required to see the whole of him at once, and so to avoid mistaking him for several persons. This complexity and versatility of character has often been mistaken for inconsistency; hence the contradictory opinions respecting him, different minds taking up very different impressions of him, and even the same mind taking up very different impressions of him at different times. Hamlet, in short, like other facts, is many-sided, and many men of many minds may see themselves in different sides of him; but when, upon comparing notes, they find him agreeing with them all, they are perplexed, and conclude him inconsistent, because they are themselves too one-sided to recognize his consistency. In so great a diversity of elements and principles, they lose the perception of identity, and cannot see how he can be so many and still be but one. Doubtless, Hamlet seems the more real, for the very reason that we cannot nnderstand him; our inability to our inability to see

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through him, or to discern the source and manner of his impressions upon us, brings him closer to nature, and makes him appear the more like a fact, and so widens and deepens his hold on our thoughts. For where there is life, there must naturally be more or less of change, the very law of life being identity in mutability; and in Hamlet, the variety and rapidity of changes are so managed, as only to infer the more intense, active, and prolific vitality. In this multitude of changes, however, it is extremely difficult to perceive the constant principle; these outward contradictions make the character more powerful, indeed, on the feelings, but much less intelligible to the mind; they help us to feel, but hinder us from seeing, the inward vital unity whence they spring.

As is generally the case with Shakspeare's characters, in order to apprehend Hamlet aright, it is necessary to go round behind the text into the elements and processes of his mind, of which the text but gives the results. For one of the excellencies, in which Shakspeare is without a competitor, is that of painting the interior history of minds. While unfolding their present condition, he, at the same time, suggests a long series of preceding conditions; portrays in far-stretching perspective the various stages and changes of a mind, each growing out of, and growing above, the one that preceded it. Among these instances of historical perspective, perhaps there is none more worthy of study than Hamlet.

Up to his father's death, Hamlet's mind, busied in developing its innate riches, had found room for no sentiments towards others but a gentle and generous trust and confidence. Delighted with the appearances of good, and protected by his rank from the naked approaches of evil, he had no motive to pry through the semblances into the reality of surrounding characters. The ideas of princely elevation and of moral rectitude, springing forth simultaneously in his mind, had intertwisted their fibres closely and firmly together. While the chaste forms of youthful imagination had kept his own heart pure, he had framed his conceptions of others according to the model within himself. To the feelings of the son, the prince, the gentleman, the friend, and the scholar,

had lately been joined the feelings of the lover; and his heart, oppressed by the redundancy of hopes and joys that enriched it, had breathed forth its fullness in "almost all the holy vows of heaven." Though soaring at will into the loftiest, or grasping the widest, or scanning the deepest regions of thought, he yet felt how poor and paltry are all the gifts and shows of intellect, compared to purity, and gentleness, and lowliness of heart; could repose, with all the satisfaction which superior natures alone can know, upon the bosom of virgin innocence and virgin loveliness; and in the simple goodness which is unconscious of itself, from its very perfection, could discern a worth which puts to shame the proudest exhibitions and triumphs of mind.

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In his father, endowed with every royal and manly quality, Hamlet had realized the bright ideal of character which he aspired to exemplify in himself. Whatever noble images and ideas he had gathered from the fields of poetry and philosophy, he had learned to associate with that sacred name. To the throne he looked forward with hope and with fear, as an elevation from whence to diffuse the blessings of a wise sovereignty, and receive the homage of a grateful submission. To reproduce in himself his father's character, was, in his view, to deserve, and therefore to secure, his father's place; and as the crown was not hereditary, he regarded his own prospects of succession as suspended on the continuance of his father's life, until he could discover in himself the virtues that originated his father's title. In his father's death, therefore, he lost the chief support of both his affections and his pretensions.

But though bereavement and disappointment had thus united to teach Hamlet the power of sorrow, the foundations of his peace and happiness were yet unshaken. The prospects of the prince had perhaps vanished, only to disclose still brighter prospects for the man. He could still love, and trust, and revere; the fire-side and the student's bower were yet open to him; truth and beauty, thought and affection, had not yet hidden their faces from him. His mind, though deeply saddened and subdued, was not diseased; and his bereavement had the effect to quicken and chasten his sensibility without disordering

his affections. With a heart, cunning and prompt to discover and appropriate the remunerations of life, he could compensate the loss of some objects, with a more free and tranquil enjoyment of such as remained. In the absence of his father, he could collect and concentrate upon his mother the feelings hitherto shared between them; and in cases like this, the part of an object often exceeds the whole, inasmuch as a religious feeling towards the dead comes in to enrich and sanctify an affection for the living. And even if his mother also had but died, the loss, though unspeakably bitter, would not have been baleful to him; for, though separated from the chief objects of his love, and trust, and reverence, he would still have retained those sentiments themselves in all their strength and beauty. Nay, death would not so much have taken her away from him, as brought her nearer to his feelings and raised her to a higher place in them; as her form vanished from his sight, the sweet, sacred image of a mother, which filial piety loves to cherish, would

have come,

"Apparelled in more precious habit, More moving, delicate, and full of life, Into the eye and prospect of his soul, Than when she lived indeed."

For when those whom such a being loves die with their honors fresh and bright about them, they become, in some sort, omnipresent and immortal to him:

"The future brightens on his sight, For on the past has fallen a light That tempts him to adore."

It is not with his mother, however, but with his faith in her, that Hamlet is forced to part; it is not herself, but her honor, that dies to him. To his prophetic soul her hasty and incestuous marriage brings at once conviction of his mother's infidelity and suspicion of his uncle's treachery to his father. In the disclosure of her guilt and baseness his best affections themselves suffer death; for while, to such a mind, death immortalizes the objects of its love, infamy annihilates them. Where he has most loved, and trusted, and revered, there he finds himself most deceived. The

sadness of bereavement now settles into the deep, dark gloom of a wounded spirit; and life appears a burden to be borne, not a blessing to be cherished. In this condition, the appearance of his father's ghost, its awful disclosures and still more awful injunctions, confirming the suspicion of his uncle's treachery, and implicating his mother in the crime, complete his desolation of mind.

But this is not all. The garden of his own life having now become a desert, he feels that he can breathe nothing but desolation over the life which he has once sweetened with the music of his vows. In his terrible visitation he reads the necessity of giving up the gentle, the cherished Ophelia; for he loves her too well to entangle her in the web of horrors from which he sees no escape for himself. But, though he resigns the object of his love, he does not and cannot resign the love itself; and the consciousness that he must leave her whom he loves, and leave her even because he loves her, finishes the death and burial of his hopes.

"The sigh so piteous and profound, As it did seem to shatter all his bulk, And end his being,"

could only spring from the depths of a wounded spirit, as he gazed, in the anguish of despair, on the beloved one who had written her name all over his thoughts.

So much for Hamlet's internal history until the extinction of his earthly prospects and purposes in the awful words, "Remember me." But amid these accumulated agonies, and though suffering all that he can suffer save remorse and selfreproach, he yet retains all his original integrity and uprightness of soul, and his quick moral sensibilities shrink from the very conception of meanness and wrong. In the depths of his being, even below the region of distinct consciousness, there lurks the instinct and impulse of a moral law that forbids revenge, especially such a revenge as he is called upon to administer. With this impulse of rectitude thus dimly and deeply working within him, the injunction of his father's ghost comes in conflict.

What, indeed, is the quality of the act enjoined upon him? Nothing less, to be

sure, than to kill at once his uncle, his mother's husband, and his anointed sovereign. And this deed, thus involving homicide, parricide, and regicide, all rolled into one, he is called to perform, not as an act of justice, and in a judicial manner, but as an act of revenge, and by assassination. Surely this could hardly be expected of one who had the misfortune to live before the dawn of that wisdom which so admirably teacheth, that to kill a father, or mother, or bishop, or king, is but common homicide! How shall Hamlet justify such a deed to the world? How vindicate himself from the reproach of the very crime he is called upon to revenge? For the evidence upon which he is required to act is in its nature available at best only in the court of his own conscience. In view of such an act he might well say to himself:

"If I could find example

Of thousands who had struck anointed kings, And flourished after, I'd not do't; but since Nor brass, nor stone, nor parchment, bears not

one,

Let villany itself forswear't."

Hamlet, then, is called upon to punish one crime, by committing what seems to him another crime; for the same religion which in his mind enjoins filial piety also forbids revenge; so that he dare neither reject nor perform the mandate from the ghost.

Thus his conscience is divided, not merely against his inclination, but against itself; it plucks him on, and plucks him off; it provokes the resolution, but prevents the performance. However much he multiplies reasons and motives upon himself in favor of the deed, there yet springs up, from a depth in his nature which reflection has never fathomed, an impulse against it, which he can neither account for nor resist. The truth is, his moral instincts are too strong for his intellectual convictions. It is the triumph of a pure moral nature over temptation in its most imposing and insinuating form-in the form of a sacred call from heaven, or what is such to him. He thinks, indeed, that he ought to perform the act, resolves that he will do it, and blames himself for not doing it; but there is a power within him and yet above him, which, in spite of himself, overmasters his resolutions and thwarts them; and

he cannot do the thing for the simple reason, though he knows it not, and believes it not, that he is too good to do it. The trouble with him, in short, lies not in himself, but in his situation; it all arises from the impossibility of translating the outward call of duty into a free, spontaneous moral impulse; and of course he cannot perform it, until he has so translated it; for he is so constituted, that in such an undertaking he must act from himself, not from another.

It is from this strife between incompatible duties, that Hamlet's perplexity and indecision spring. For escape from this dilemma all his faculties and resources are taxed and strained to the uttermost. His moral sensitiveness, shrinking from the dreadful summons to revenge, throws him back upon his reflective powers, and sends him through the abysses of thought, in quest of a reconciliation between his conflicting duties, so that he may shelter either the performance of the deed from the reproach of irreligion, or the non-performance from the reproach of filial impiety. In this condition springs of thought, and feeling, and action, beyond the reach of our minds, are opened within him. Here, then, we have an example of a great mind so circumstanced that all its greatness has to come out in thought; which, indeed, seems to have been the poet's design.

And it should be especially remarked withal, that the same voice which calls Hamlet to this terrible undertaking, also reveals to him the fearful retributions of futurity; so that in proportion as he is nerved by a sense of the duty, he is at the same time shaken by a dread of the responsibility. "The eternal blazon," which "must not be to ears of flesh and blood," hurries him away from action into meditation on the dread realities of the invisible world; and his resolution is suspended by the apprehensions started up in his mind by the ghost's disclosures respecting "the secrets of its prison house." Nay, his filial reverence itself leads him, first to regret, then to doubt, and finally to disbelieve, that his father has laid upon him an injunction so repugnant to his sense of right. Upon reflection he discerns in the nature of the mandate something that makes him question and distrust its source; it clashes with his sentiment of moral rectitude; and he wisely thinks, that "light which leads astray cannot be light from heaven." It seems to him more probable, that the ghost should be a counterfeit of his father, than that his father should give such an order. He must have grounds more relative than this."

[To be concluded in our next number.]

FOREIGN MISCELLANY.

THE intelligence from Europe is of more than The change in the persons of the members, ordinary interest. The British Parliament has is said to be vastly greater than was ever known met at an earlier period than usual, for the dis-before-excepting only the election which sucpatch of business. The only proceeding of which we yet have information, is the re-election of the Speaker of the House of Commons. The composition of that body is stated by the London Quarterly Review to consist of

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ceeded the passage of the Reform Act. There were then 280 new members, and in the present instance the number is 223, which, under the circumstances, is a more remarkable change. The alteration in the pursuits of the members is also indicative of political or social change. The number of railway directors, engineers and contractors, of barristers, merchants, retail traders, political writers and lecturers, is greater; while the naval and military officers, the connections of aristocratic and wealthy families, have diminished in numerical force. The intentions of the Russell ministry are yet unknown, not even the Queen's Speech on the opening of Parliament having yet ar

rived here. Several failures have taken place in the commercial part of the community, but not so serious in amount as those which have preceded; and it is confidently hoped that the severity of the crisis has passed. A steady influx of gold and silver has rendered the currency less restricted; although discounts still remain at very high rates, and money very difficult to be obtained. The Directors of the Bank of England availed themselves of one portion of the recommendation of the ministry, mentioned in our last-the charging "a high rate of interest;" but omitted to comply with that which urged an enlargement of the amount of discounts and advances; and their proceedings in this respect have called forth considerable animadversion. The number of bills drawn in the colonies, which have been returned in consequence of the late failures, together with the low price of sugar and other colonial products, will yet cause considerable embarrassment; but on the other hand, the slight rise in cotton and grain, will cause a greater buoyancy in the trade with this country; and, although upon the whole, the amelioration is but small, the change will operate to restore confidence, and may prove more stable from being of slow motion. Strong hopes are entertained that the Royal Bank of Liverpool and the Bank of North and South Wales, both of which have suspended payment, will be enabled to resume business. Government stocks are more firm in price; and although the Bank of England still charges eight per cent. discount, many private establishments are content with seven and six and a half per cent. Accounts from the manufacturing districts are still unfavorable, and notwithstanding some little improvement has been evinced, it is to be apprehended that short work and a high price of provisions will be productive of very great distress among the operatives and the laboring population generally.

Ireland still continues to present a melancholy spectacle, and must cause very considerable embarrassment to the present Parliament. Famine appears again to threaten its appearance, while murder and agrarian outrages are so much on the increase, as to have produced a proclamation from the Lord Lieutenant, calling on all well-disposed persons to assist in their repression, and threatening offenders with the utmost rigor of punishment. The worst features in these offences are, that they seem to be committed by persons who have not the excuse of destitution; and that in many instances the victims are resident proprietors, who are exerting themselves to benefit the peasantry in their neighborhoods. The assassination of Major Rowan, of Stokestown, in the county of Roscommon, appears an offence of a most unaccountable character. With three years' rent due from the tenants of his estate, he last year chartered two vessels to assist a portion of them to emigrate, and had just bor

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rowed money to effect large improvements on his estate, by which he expected to employ a large number of persons during the coming winter. While engaged in this and other beneficent employments, he was shot down on his own estate-an occurrence, among others, which most painfully shows the disorganized state of society. A number of Irish members of Parliament, and influential persons, organized, for the purpose of demanding from the government employment for the people, on the unfinished improvements which were commenced last year; and, it is to be hoped, that in the present state of the peasantry, their efforts will be directed to measures of a purely practical character, and that no political feeling will be allowed to thwart the measures so imperatively demanded.

Intelligence has been received of the total loss of the packet ship Stephen Whitney, which left New-York on the 8th October. Mistaking the light upon Rock Island, near Cape Clear, on the South Coast of Ireland, for the old Head of Kinsale, she went broadside on a rock called the West Calf, about four miles inside the Cape, and in less than ten minutes was dashed to atoms, involving in her destruction, the melancholy loss of her captain and no less than 92 of her crew and passengers-18 only, out of 110, having escaped with life--the ship with many articles on board being totally lost.

The commercial and financial difficulties of England do not appear to have reached France: on the contrary securities have been steady, and notwithstanding the negotiation of a loan of 250 millions of francs which was taken by the Rothschilds, and by which a large amount of fresh stock was created, the price of funds rose at the Bourse.

A political agitation for

the extension of the elective franchise is active in France, and though greatly discouraged by the government, large meetings are held, at which the name of the king is not very respectfully greeted. Louis Philippe suffers much in public estimation from a belief of his interfering personally, with all the details of government, in a greater degree than is consistent with a limited and constitutional monarchy, where the responsibility for such acts is exclusively confined to the ministers. Count Bresson, who figured considerably in negotiating the marriage of the Queen of Spain, and also of her sister to the Duc de Montpensier, lately committed suicide, while ambassador at Naples; and his immediate predecessor at that post, Count Mortier, made a like attempt while laboring under mental alienation. Monsieur Deschappelles, the celebrated chess-player, died in Paris about the beginning of the past month; and Monsieur Parmentier, who was so disgracefully connected with the late proceedings of General Cubieres and Monsieur Teste, died of grief at Lure. It is said that the Archduchess of Parma, Maria Louisa, widow of

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