waters.

Extracting" adversity's sweet milk, philosophy," from whatever objects and occurrences he meets; sympathizing calmly yet deeply with the very feelings in others which in the stillness of thought he has subdued in himself; and dwelling in the depths, not in the tumults of the soul;-the storms which waste society only serve to kindle within him the thoughts that raise him above them; and his voice, issuing from the heart of wisdom, and sweetened with the music of humanity, speaks peace, but cannot give it, to the passions that are raging around him: his efforts to heal the strifes and perturbations, though unavailing, and even mischievous in their immediate effects, still seem apt and wise, and are even proved to be the more needful by the very circumstance that renders them ineffectual; and, as he acts upon good grounds and with the best intentions, so in his miscarriages he feels and makes us feel, that "a greater Power than he can contradict hath thwarted his intents," as if on purpose to show the insufficiency of human counsels for the management of human affairs.

LECTURE XI.

HAMLET.

THE tragedy of Hamlet has probably caused more of perplexity and discussion than any other of Shakspeare's plays. Others of them may have more of interest for particular minds, or particular states of mind, or particular periods of life: but none of them equals Hamlet in universality of interest. Doubtless this results, in part, from the hero's being "a concentration of all the interests that belong to humanity." His history is the very extraction and efficacy of the thoughts and feelings and inward experiences of us all; his life is a picture of blighted hopes and crushed affections, from which we may solve the darkest enigmas of our existence, and over which our aching hearts may bleed themselves into repose Hamlet, in short, is an universal genius, in the depth and variety of his feelings and faculties almost rivalling Shakspeare himself, and engaged, not in creating or revealing the true, the beautiful, and the good, but in conflict with the dark powers of the world. If there be a heart whose best affections have never been breathed upon by hope nor broken down by despair; which has never been called to weep over the desecration or the degradation of its most cherished objects; which has no springs of life to be sweetened by sympathy or embittered by disappoint

ment; and which has put forth no promises to be fanned by airs from heaven or scorched by blasts from hell;-such a heart may indeed contemplate the picture of Hamlet without emotion, and may find exemption from the sorrows of life in the iceberg of its own insensibility.

Coleridge very finely remarks, somewhere, that Shakspeare's characters are classes of men individualized. Of most of them this seems to me profoundly true; and Hamlet seems to differ from the others in that he is the race itself individualized. He is a sort of

glass wherein we may all see ourselves, provided we have any self; and it is not so correct to say, that he represents any one man or class of men, as that he represents them all. Hamlet, in short, is the very abridgment and eclecticism of humanity in the words of another, it is we who are Hamlet.

Accordingly, scarce any character in history has provoked so great a diversity of opinion as Hamlet; for the more generic and comprehensive a man is, the more various will the judgments of men naturally be concerning him. One man thinks Hamlet is great but wicked; another, that he is good but weak; a third, that he is a coward and dare not act ; a fourth, that he has too much intellect for his will, and so reflects away the time of action. Doubtless there are facts in the representation which, considered by themselves, would sustain any one of these views; but none of them seems reconcilable with all the facts taken together. "Yet, notwithstanding this diversity of facts and conclusions, all agree in thinking and feeling and speaking about Hamlet as an actual person. It is easy, indeed, to invest with plausi

bility almost any theory in regard to him; but it is extremely hard to make any theory comprehend the whole subject: and, though all are impressed with the truth of the character, no one is satisfied with another's explanation of it. The question is, why, with this unanimity. as to his being a man, do men differ so much as to what sort of a man he is?

In reasoning upon facts we are apt to forget what complex, many-sided things we are dealing with. We often speak of them as very simple and intelligible things, whereas, in reality, they are most profoundly and inscrutably mysterious: they may indeed be used to explain other things, but they cannot themselves be explained. For example, how many causes, elements, conditions and processes go to the forming of a rose? The combined agencies of all nature work together in its production, are all represented by it, and inferable from it. Thus facts involve and infer many things at the same time; they present manifold elements and qualities in consistency and unity, and so express a diversity of meanings which cannot be gathered up into a form of logical explanation. Even if we seize and draw out severally and successively all the properties of a fact, still we are as far as ever from producing the effect of their combination in the fact itself. It is this mysteriousness of facts that begets our respect for them, our docility to them, and our interest in them: could we master them, we should cease to regard them; could we explain them, we should feel at liberty to substitute our explanations for the things explained. For, to see round and through a thing, implies a sort of conquest over it; and when we get, or think we have got, above a thing,

we naturally either overlook it, or else look down upon it: finding or fancying we have mastered a thing, we are apt to neglect it, or, what is worse, put off that humility towards it, which, besides being itself the better part of wisdom, is our only key to the remainder.

In this complexity of facts is obviously contained the material of innumerable theories; for, "in so great a store of properties belonging to the self-same thing, every man's mind may take hold of some special consideration above the rest;" and it is characteristic of facts, that, seen through any given theory, they always seem to prove only that one, though really affording equal proof to fifty other theories. In short, many of the elements, perhaps all the elements of truth may meet together in a fact; and nothing is more common than for several minds 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