ancle's guilt; but it is by a method that reveals his knowledge to his uncle, whom an evil conscience had made eager to discover whether some such knowledge did not lie at the root of Hamlet's change of manner. And now, why does not Hamlet kill the King? An easy opportunity offers. But his mind is again too busy; he refrains out of no spirit of mercy, but because he cannot kill the King enough. The King is praying. Killed now, he might find heaven. Hamlet will wait till he can kill more perfectly, body and soul. And two months have now slipped by since Hamlet undertook his duty. This is marked by a passage in the play scene. "How cheerfully my mother looks, and my father died within two hours." Ophelia. Nay, 'tis twice two months, my lord." At the beginning of the play, it was Nay, not two months, not two." The King, who has learnt from Hamlet the danger to himself, loses no time, though Hamlet still delays. Hamlet allows himself to be shipped off to England, with secret orders for his execution there. While he is still thus passive, he sees the forces of young Fortinbras, whose preparation against Denmark has been diverted to the Polack, pass over a plain before him, and again has clear intellectual sense of his own fault. He can tell himself what the play telis to us all, that—

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"He that made us with such large discourse,
Looking before and after, gave us not

That capability and God-like reason

To fust in us unused."

All deeds of Hamlet are by action without premeditation. By sudden impulse he stabs Polonius behind the arras, without time even to give full birth to the thought that he may be killing the King. No thinking of his could possibly have foreseen or brought the pirate ship that came into engagement with the ship carrying him to England; and it was not even with design so to return to Denmark that he leapt to the other deck as the ships grappled for action.

But when he had returned he was again passive He accepted passively the challenge to the fencing match, and when he at last did kill his own and his father's murderer, it was by action on the impulse of the moment. It was done rashly, as Hamlet said to Horatio of an act of his on board the ship; and Hamlet's comment on this rashness has in it the soul of the play

"Let us know,

Our indiscretion sometimes serves as well

When our deep plots do pall; and that should teach us,
There's a divinity that shapes our ends
Rough hew them how we will."

How many Hamlets are there in the world with intellectual power for large usefulness, who wait, day by day and year by year, in hope to do more perfectly what they live to do; die, therefore, and leave their lives unused: while men of lower power, prompt for action, are content and ready to do what they can, well knowing that at the best they can only rough hew, but in humble trust that leaves to God the issues of the little service they may bring. It is a last touch to the significance of this whole play that at its close the man whose fault is the reverse of Hamlet's-the man of ready action, though it be with little thought, the stir of whose energies was felt in the opening scene-reenters from his victory over the Polack, and the curtain falls on Fortinbras, King HENRY MORLEY.

SCENE-ELSINORE; except in the fourth scene of the fifth act, where it is a PLAIN IN DENMARK.

Fran. Nay answer me: stand, and unfold your

Ber. Long live the king!

Fran. Bernardo?

Ber. He.

Fran. You come most carefully upon your

hour.

Ber. "T is now struck twelve: get thee to bed, Francisco.

Fran. For this relief much thanks: 't is bitter

The rivals of my watch, bid them make haste.

Fran. I think I hear them.-Stand! Who's

there?

Enter HORATIO and MARCELLUS.

Hor. Friends to this ground.

Mar.

And liegemen to the Dane.

Fran. Give you good night.

Mar. O, farewell, honest soldier: who hath

relieved you?

Fran. Bernardo has my place. Give you good

night.

Mar. Holla! Bernardo !

[Exit.

Ber. Welcome, Horatio: welcome, good Mar

cellus.

Mar. What, has this thing appeared again to

night?

Ber. I have seen nothing.

Mar. Horatio says, 'tis but our fantasy,
And will not let belief take hold of him

Touching this dreaded sight twice seen of us,―
Therefore, I have entreated him along
With us to watch the minutes of this night,
That, if again this apparition come,

He may approve our eyes, and speak to it.
Hor. Tush, tush! 't will not appear.
Ber.

30

Sit down awhile,

And let us once again assail your ears,
That are so fortified against our story,
What we have two nights seen.

Hor.

Well, sit we down

And let us hear Bernardo speak of this.

Ber. Last night of all,

When yond same star, that's westward from the

pole

Had made his course to illume that part of