OPHELIA.

Looking across the intervale of our prosaic concerns, we descry

the outlines of Hamlet, as they build on the horizon a symmetry,

enticing depth, weird masses, and a lonely top. We try to recognize

the distinctions of this grand object which has been lifted there for

ever to attract the curiosity of men. It is too remote to be minutely

pictured: the shadows that apprise us of its deep seclusion veil

the openings of paths by which it is to be explored. Stretches of a

livelier color report to us the verdure and perfume of youth: the

clouds that fling their pensive intervals upon it pass off pursued

by gladness. But we perceive whole tracts that slope inwardly to

sombreness where the fancy is interrupted by awe and vague surmise.

Whither will those rifts lead us? Into what places visited by nothing

human, whence we hurriedly return, looking back with a sense of some

invisible pursuit, as if the forest shuddered with an adjuration which

overtook, beneath the ground, our feet? What various latitudes are

repeated along that height, with a zone for every season! It is shaped

by all the weathers of the year: it groups within itself the smiles,

the terrors, the fitful moods of Nature, and puts them into a distance

of sublime effect.

While we are observing it, there grows thither, as if deposited out

of the day, a softening tint; one hardly knows if it be light, or

color, or a vapor, or how it be compounded of them all. But it envelops

the whole outline, and spills over into every opening, a gracious

refinement, an investiture not easily described, a light touch of

gentle qualities which decline to be quoted in the dry list of the

appraiser. It is the tender lady, the maiden with the delicate bloom

of love and the remoteness of it,--the impalpable Ophelia. To detain

and handle is impossible, not because, like some rare sphinx-moth,

the downy wings flutter into hiding; for she is motionless as a stain

of color, restful as a summer afternoon when all the noises sleep:

she is a sentiment that broods without a stir upon the lofty Hamlet;

she gives no sound to challenge your attention, and is unable to goad

her exquisite reserve into any marked behavior. But this shyness is

broad enough to cover Hamlet's variety all over, and does not let one

of his features straggle beyond its subduing purple. She is the tone

of the whole wide landscape that stretches between your soul and his.

What need has she to multiply words, to intensify her shape upon the

background of the action? Small need has she to borrow the saucy wit

of Beatrice, to make up her lips with the pertness of Rosalind, or

compress them with the firmness of Helena. They just suit the touch

of Hamlet's lips when his unbend from gathering the speech of solemn

thoughts. She offers them, and his cloud empties of its density.

She draws off the accumulated sparks of reason, makes him safe and

domestic, steals into him with content that even he cannot measure, up

to the time when a father's death untuned his prophetic soul. She will

learn to prattle about flowers, but, alas! not steeped like Perdita,

in glad midsummer; not to beguile her lord, but to deck the bride-bed

of her fate. She wears her rue "with a difference." But, in the mean

time, she may neglect Lord Hamlet's books, and keep her mind guiltless

of entertaining views. She would have no fancy for going to school of

Portia, perhaps no taste to learn the "neat cookery" of Imogen. Her

hands are well fashioned to soothe the hours when "the pale cast of

thought" wishes to escape from itself into some fair, open nature, and

to feel its flattery. Because she is not a character, she is a tune:

she is

"That old and antique song we heard last night."

The waters will soon pull "the poor wretch from her melodious lay

to muddy death." So, for a while, let her be the mood she is, the

sentiment that Heaven made her, to glint through palace-windows across

the marble floors and gild Hamlet's high-strung nerves. That noble

mind,--

"The expectancy and rose of the fair state,

The glass of fashion, and the mould of form,

The observ'd of all observers,"--

is not playing at the feet of a fatuous woman, with silly, pretty

face, and bird-like chatter of a soulless brain, to marry that misery

at last. Many a superior man ties such a bunch of plumage, with the

minutest mouthful of a body inside of it, into his buttonhole; when

it falls out, the tie drags it, feebly fluttering, across the ground.

But Ophelia has an instinct deep enough to fathom "the courtier's,

soldier's, scholar's eye, tongue, sword;" and he as instinctively

surrenders his depths to that survey, which is none the less sufficing

because it is so artless. No: it is all the more competent to

correspond to his wide temper; the only ladyhood in the land for its

only prince.

Fair flower, half-drooping, half-springing from a cleft in Elsinore's

grim platform, where wafts of ghostly air shudder out of the midnight

of the frosty ocean, and the fate-sisters who take the breath of

heroes are at hand. At length the dreadful secret mingles with her

fragrance, which then comes to us distempered. She does not know what

has happened; but in the sudden death and private burial of her father,

slain by her own lover, she, sitting amid the relics of a rejected

love, listening across the "sweet bells jangled, out of tune and harsh"

of her old lover's soul-chime, intuitively feels 'that there are

"Tricks i' the world; and hems, and beats her heart;

Spurns enviously at straws; speaks things in doubt,

That carry but half sense."

With what a small outlay of dramatic contrivance has Shakspeare drawn

the pathos of Ophelia's fate! It begins to infect us as soon as we

discover that she loves; for her lover receives the visits of a

murdered father. We know, but she does not, the cause of the apparent

unsettling of the Prince's wits. We can anticipate into what tragedies

that ghost beckons her Lord Hamlet, while she walks unconsciously

so close that her garments, perfumed with rare ladyhood, brush the

greaves of the grisly visitant. Her helplessness is not cast in a

faint, outline against the background of these palace treacheries

and lusts; but it appears in startling vividness, because she is so

pure, so remote from all the wicked world, so slenderly fitted out to

contend with it. Tears are summoned when we see how simple she is, and

fashioned solely for dependence: a disposition, not a will; a wife for

Hamlet's will, but poor to husband one of her own.

What will become of her? What becomes of the vine when lightning splits

its oak? The clipping tendrils and soft green have lost their reason

for existing when the wood which centuries have grained is blasted

in an hour. She will shrink into herself, will sicken, grow sere,

rustle to and fro. Her leaves will blab loose songs to every wanton

wind. To wither is all that is left to do, since all that she could do

was to love, to climb, to cling, to cloak ruggedness with grace, to

make strength and stature serve to lift and develop all her beauteous

quality.

She is free to love, yet bound by old-fashioned duty toward her father;

and he belongs to the old fashion of supposing that a prince can only

amuse himself, no matter what sweet protestations flow into her ear.

She cannot believe it; nor, when her flighty brother serves her with

long-winded cautions on the same subject, does she hardly seem to

listen. Her answers are so short that she plainly does not share his

solicitude. In fact, she is highly amused to see him play the prig with

the consequential air which only a brother can assume. Between the

lines there are peals of girlish laughter, not printed, as she turns

upon him with the advice to take himself into custody. This amusement

ripples through her retort:--

"Good my brother,

Do not, as some ungracious pastors do,

Show me the steep and thorny way to heaven;

Whilst, like a puff'd and reckless libertine,

Himself the primrose path of dalliance treads,

And recks not his own rede."

The old songs which Ophelia had picked up by no means decide that she

was passionate enough to justify so much advice on the point. Some

nurse who crooned over her, some book of old ballads, such as Autolycus

might leave at the door, was responsible for the scraps which floated

into her unconscious girlhood. It frequently happens to an unwary, half

developed youth that things not excessive in decorum get established

in the memory. They are kept strenuously secret, unless something

demoralizes the brain. When madness tears her modesty all to tatters,

they escape, and wander without a rag of clothing through her talk.

They do not betray that she was ever less than a true lady. She rebukes

Hamlet during the mock play, when the expectation of unmasking the

king ferments in him with the flightiest remarks, and his tongue rides

a steeple-chase over the bounds of courtesy. She will not listen, and

says to him, "You are naught, you are naught: I'll mark the play."

However, she knows her lord to be a gentleman; for she has often

silently felt the effluence of an honest man whose manners and morals

were noble. She pays no consideration to the family caution.

It is noteworthy how Shakspeare defends Ophelia from our censure while

she is chanting those free ditties of an olden time. We listen to them

in company with the pitying King and Queen: the air seems to gather

pity to tone the rude surprise. She was naturally full 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

the symbolic meanings of flowers; and a light irony invests some of

them. It is plain that the rosemary, for remembrance, is ideally

bestowed upon Laertes, with pansies too: "A document in madness;

thoughts and remembrance fitted." Rosemary was supposed to have the

quality of strengthening the memory. The volatile Laertes will have

need of it, and of as many thoughts as he can muster. The fennel ought

to be handed to Horatio, and the columbines should be intended for the

king: the one is a symbol of flattery and is exchanged among courtiers,

but Horatio never learned the useful trade; the others are expressive

of ingratitude and cuckoldom. Was Hamlet's father slain because of

that? The columbines were earned betimes! There's rue for the queen;

for she has great need of repentance. There's rue for herself too.

Both need it; but the queen with a difference, as her moral condition

differed from Ophelia's. We may call it an herb that leads to grace.

There's a daisy. She recognizes it, but ought not to keep it for

herself. And there is no other maiden present. It represents frivolous

and light-thoughted girls. She would give Laertes some violets, if they

had not all withered when his father died. These delicate allusions

make us think that before the distraction set in Ophelia had inklings

of the foul concerns around her. All the more hopeless, then, became

the overthrow of reason.

Hamlet is too finely endowed to sport with her inclining maidenhood.

She has no more calculation than a flower. She lets her beauty bend

towards him without timidity; for she likes that he should sip the

chalice which he will not rudely shatter. After every visit he used

to leave behind him a sense of honor which occupied her heart when

his lips had ceased protesting. Yet she will defer to the father,

with the instinct, perhaps, that more favorable dispositions will

transpire. Polonius, the old stickler for the conventions of royalty,

is thoroughly possessed with the idea that the Prince, from that point

of view, cannot be intending marriage. Some over-subtle critics will

have it that the old schemer is secretly chuckling over the idea that

a match may be made, but that he dreads the king. If Hamlet can only

be brought to the decisive point, and held there, the temper of the

court will be of little consequence. But what method shall be employed

with a prince who so loves to push off upon his moods of feeling to

let them get unhitched and float him from corresponding facts? A

double contrivance occurs to Polonius,--to protect his daughter from

the possible waywardness of a prince, and to pique him into making a

declaration of alliance. This is a delicate operation; for the king

will jealously scrutinize his movements. It seems as if he was merely

protecting his daughter, and keeping faith with his king, when he urges

her not to receive the letters which besiege her door, nor to admit

him any longer to her presence. Then the sly old rat, not yet gone to

burrow behind the arras, hopes to gnaw into the King by attributing

Hamlet's strange behavior to love for Ophelia. And he has so nicely

arranged matters, by prohibiting letters and visits, that when the

King, bending severe brows upon him, asks, "How hath she received his

love?" he can reply, with a flush of honor, "What do you think of me?"

I cannot find that the context will justify this theory. It is

contradicted by the evident alarm and sorrow which the old man displays

when Ophelia describes the piteous plight of Hamlet after his repulse;

for what does Polonius know about a "father's spirit in arms" laying

waste the Prince's soul? No: he must be deep in love; and Polonius must

hasten to report it to the King.

We recur to the plain theory that Polonius supposes that a king's son

is out of the star of her unaspiring thought, and that such a match

would be against the stomach of the Court. He will cling to his lord

chamberlain's staff and totter with it to the end. The daughter,

respecting his fears, inflicts this harsh repulse upon Hamlet. How

we pity the Prince, who is turned away from her dear house whither

he would have longed to repair, weighed down with his awful secret,

to place his heart upon her restfulness, and let its rhythm soothe

the cracking nerves! Yet she "did return his letters, and denied his

access," perhaps the very morning after he had sworn the platform oath.

There's nothing to depend on left in Denmark. Who next is false? What

truth or feeling escapes the monstrous irony?

But mark how quickly Ophelia's love jumps at the father's plan to bring

them again together, as if by accident, in order that the King and he

may observe, by the nature of the interview, whether he is mad from

love of her. And when he thrusts a book into her hand, that she may

have the pretence of reading when Hamlet enters, she gladly adopts the

whole device; for has she not just heard the Queen confess that she

hopes Hamlet loves her?

"For your part, Ophelia, I do wish

That your good beauties be the happy cause

Of Hamlet's wildness; so shall I hope your virtues

Will bring him to his wonted way again,

To both your honors."

Can she believe her ears? Hamlet's own mother hopes, as she afterwards

confessed directly above Ophelia's grave, that she may become the

wife of Hamlet. Then all the scruples of Laertes and her father are

groundless. However indisposed the King may feel to such a match, she

has a suitor in the heart of the mother. Welcome the opportunity,

welcome any stratagem, even that of taking his remembrances from her

bosom, to have them returned to her,--a woman's wile to receive them

back more rich than ever with smiles of a recovered love.

The more common theory is that Ophelia does not suspect the mother's

inclination for such a marriage. The Queen's language is guarded, and

capable of two interpretations; but she spoke in the presence of the

King. Measure the extent of her meaning by the depth of Ophelia's

grave. Still, it is commonly thought that Ophelia understands the

Queen to expect of her to make Hamlet realize the hopelessness of

his passion, trusting to have his disorder dismissed with his love.

In that case, she is merely yielding to the father's suggestion that

these remembrances of his shall be returned; and the old plotter has

arranged this for the King to witness. Filial deference cannot stoop

lower than this sad enforcement; but her whole life has been the

non-assertion of a will. She,

"Of ladies most deject and wretched,

That suck'd the honey of his music vows,"

and who longed to

"Bring him to his wonted way again,"

is still so docile, so subject to the pervading influence of her

father's house, that she declares to Hamlet she has wished for a long

time to redeliver his gifts and letters, "of so sweet breath composed."

And when we hear her say,

"To the noble mind,

Rich gifts wax poor, when givers prove unkind,"

we have a glimpse of the interview that was brought on by him when, as

she was sewing in her chamber, he forced himself into her presence, in

disordered dress, and with a manner as if he would dismiss her from his

heart. It wounded and distressed her:--

"Oh, woe is me!

To have seen what I have seen, see what I see!"

It need not seem unnatural that the fair girl is so obsequious to the

father's will. We find no mother in the house: she is gone, and the

only daughter and only son transfer their love of a mother to the

bereaved father, and cling to him with a devotion that includes a

special submissiveness. They live very much withdrawn into themselves,

and mutually dependent. The gentle daughter consults in her solitude

the wishes and humors, even the whims, of the father, whose capacity

for giving sound advice she perceives to have greatly aged. She loves

to be retired within the old mansion, whose still life suits a maiden

shyness. We come upon her sewing in her chamber, thinking of Hamlet.

"As patient as the female dove,

When that her golden couplets are disclos'd,"

she sits drooping in silence, remembering her lord, but remembering too

that, when her father pooh-poohed her talk about the Prince's affection

for her, and bade her look out for herself, she sighed and said, "I

shall obey, my lord." She is very much absorbed in contriving solace

for a lonely father. So, when she learns that he has been killed, and

that the blow was dealt by Hamlet, by what freak of accident she cannot

understand,--but "a young maid's wits" prove to be "as mortal as an

old man's life,"--the daughter suddenly empties every thing out of her

heart except affection for the cherished, fatuous old father: her love

for Hamlet is spilled out through that rent in the arras, as we can

notice when all her pretty, distracted singing yields not a tone that

might be an echo of the sweet episode in her poor little life. For

otherwise, when madness broke up her maidenly reserve, and permitted

us to pry into the dispositions of her soul, we ought to have found

there a love for Hamlet as deeply seated as devotion to a father; but

it never was so deep, and never had time enough to surmount all other

considerations. Therefore the sad wanderings bury the father over and

over again, finding a fresh grave for him each time:--

"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."

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

unambitious 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, that "here she is allow'd

her virgin crants, her maiden strewments," and even a bell! If the sour

old ritualist could have had his way, he would have pitched "shards,

flints, and pebbles" over her. It is not only pity which increases, but

respect, with every line: it takes her part, and magnifies her nature.

There must have been more of her than we used to think. So, when the

requiem is denied, Laertes pronounces it for all when he says,--

"A minist'ring angel shall my sister be,"

as she always had been. And our sentiment recalls the dominant

excellence of her character. If ever the priest himself should come

to grief, and lie howling in that place which is paved with good

intentions and bad practices, she would be the first to toss him a

sprig of "herb o' grace o' Sundays."

When Laertes lets fall the word "sister," Hamlet appears to utter

nothing but ordinary surprise,--"What! the fair Ophelia?"--and his

action goes no further. Some critics have inferred, from this absence

of manifested emotion, that Hamlet never really loved Ophelia, and that

his subsequent passionate outbreak was only inspired by pique at seeing

Laertes take on so with leaping into the grave as if to fill it with

hyperboles of language. It is said that, at the very instant of hearing

her name, a lover would have exclaimed bitterly, would have rushed

forward into the funeral group to agitate its grief afresh with his

own, would have sunk into some gesture of abandonment. Romeo might have

improvised such a scene, but Hamlet was a different style of lover: he

was always "ill at such numbers. His emotion smouldered underneath all

the refinements of intellect and conscience, and rarely gleamed through

the scruples of his will. When it did gain a moment's mastery, as in

that scene of surrendering love,--

"He raised a sigh so piteous and profound,

That it did seem to shatter all his bulk,

And end his being,"

it palsied the tongue, and only advertised itself in the pathetic eyes

which fell to such perusal of Ophelia's face, "and to the last bended

their light" on her.

Let us try to conceive the situation at the grave. Hamlet has been

absent in England during Ophelia's distraction. Returning, he strolls

into a churchyard, amuses himself with the old grave-digger, withdraws

aside when the train approaches, so as not to be recognized by the

King. Then comes the discovery that Ophelia is dead. There was always

in Hamlet's brain that time allowed for the transit of a message

between his feeling and his deed. The line connected with a great many

intermediate tracts, in each of which there was delay. Nothing but an

unsyllabled fluid of conjecture passed all along the way. Dead? How?

Was that glad girl the one to take her own life? Why? There was just

time enough for him to hear that confession of his mother,--

"I hop'd thou shouldst have been my Hamlet's wife."

What a remembrance, extorted from death, of the old love that he never

could conceal from the mother's instinct which was so fond and clear!

He listens thus to despair reclaiming former hopes, and it draws his

spirit backward, so that the body cannot move and the tongue dare not

break this sacred silence of his retrospection. Therefore, Laertes

has plenty of time to rant like Pistol in a tavern. His exaggerated

action plunges into the grave of Hamlet's reverie and breaks it up.

The Prince is forced into disgust at hearing a man vaunt love against

his own. All scruples are shrivelled up in anger; and he instinctively

assumes the tone he hears. The old ironical disgust for sham makes

the imitation perfect. Afterward, to Horatio, he acknowledges that he

forgot himself:--

"But, sure, the bravery of his grief did put me

Into a towering passion."

And this passion broke open his respect and prudence, and let loose the

first cry of his love that had ever reached the ears of others. Else

it would have lain buried with Ophelia in the silence of her lover's

breast.

It was too much,--to discover at such a moment what used to be his

mother's expectations; to see the sprinkling of those flowers that

should have been for marriage; to have the old conviction return, that

marriage was impossible for him,--a man whose bed, watched by a ghost,

could have no other tenant; to recall how he ousted love, that revenge

might occupy. It was too much for this heart of sensitive and noble

strain to see the dead girl, and catch through the rant of Laertes that

her prince had indirectly caused her death. His solid flesh could

not melt: the coffin chilled it. But how long could he listen to this

man, whose affected furor showed him to be a person incapable of deep

passion? It fans all that smoulders in him into smoke and flame. In the

rage of a temperament whose trick it always was to baffle itself, and

in the bitterness of being reminded by her cold beauty that he had

to surrender it while it was too young to die,--it is too masterful.

He bursts into Laertes's vein with its own style,--

"Nay, an thou'lt mouth,

I'll rant as well as thou,"

but soon checks himself with a half apology, and subsides.

How mobile and impressible he was, notwithstanding his large capacity

of reason! The latter aided him to dissimulate and to keep his

projects waiting; but the other traits nourished a fancy that easily

turned to mimicry of whatever was transpiring; as when he assumed,

half-consciously, the dandified phrasing of Osric, and played with

Rosencrantz and Guildenstern. This plastic fancy jumped to the high

stilts of Laertes, and it stalked to "make Ossa like a wart."

But his bosom secret has escaped. He turns away, is followed by

Horatio, to whom, before the next scene opens, we hear him (though

no folio nor quarto ever lisped a syllable of it) pouring out the

confidences of a fruitless passion to the only honest man of all the

crowd, the still and trusty comrade. This Shakspeare would have us

understand, I think, by giving Hamlet to say to Horatio, as they enter

the next scene together, "So much for this, sir." So much for what? we

think. Then it dawns upon us that the only other interest of the moment

must have been Ophelia's death.

And we recollect that Horatio was absent at the time of her death,

having gone to meet Hamlet near the sea-coast. So both of them were

ignorant of the occurrence. But now Horatio has been making inquiries

during the time that elapses between the burial and the next scene.

He picks up all the particulars, and has been detailing to the eager

Hamlet all that we know. And Hamlet's entry upon the next scene is

timed exactly when Horatio has ceased narrating. There is nothing more

to tell. Hamlet enters, saying, "So much for this, sir. Now you shall

see the other." That is, I will relate what has happened to me also,

and how a divinity has shaped my ends to this return. And his brief

life is claimed again by the native land on which a ghost has left the

tracks of a murder; for great Heaven has not yet hunted it down. So

"Lay her i' the earth;

And from her fair and unpolluted flesh

May violets spring,"

to renew the breed which withered with the death of her father.