The Contemporary Review, January 1883 / Vol 43, No. 1

was not an ordinary filial affection, it was a h

t of Jove

rs, to threate

ween earth

ion, and a

od did seem t

world assura

life, and substance to the world. That his love for his mother was equally intense, is clearly discernible in

ehead of an i

mother we

een his

ost by hi

upon the machinery of power as part of the comedy of life, and would be more amused than impressed by the equipage of office, its chains and titles, the frowns of authority, and the smiles of imaginary greatness. He therefore of all men needed a personal centre in which faith and affection could unite to give seriousness and dignity to life; and this he had found from his childhood in the sovereign virtues of the King and Queen. So that his criticism in these earlier days was but the fastidiousness of love, that dispar

t they were of the same stuff as his own thoughts-were pliant and yielding, and could be readily unwoven by the logic that wove them, would tempt him to move and displace, and build and construct, until he might have a collection of opinions large enough t

nce to his bo

in pure submission to their control all the various activities of his versatile nature, its irony and its earnestness, its shrewdness and its fancy, its piety and its free-thinking,

o much their own way with Hamlet, and have read into him something of their own laboriousness and phlegm. But Hamlet was more of a poet than a professor. He had the temperament of a man of genius-impatient, animated, eager, swift to feel,

ved of all

ee, open, unsu

em

and free from

the use of the sword. He was a soldier first, a sch

elids would n

dier

ashion, and the

sensibility on the point of hon

find quarrel

our is a

e man of action, recognize

like a soldier

ikely, had h

roved mos

accumulation of sorrow could tame, whose enthusiasm embraced Nature, art, and literature, and whose delight was always fresh and new, "in this excellent canopy the air, in this brave

intact, his energy unimpaired. His mother remained to him, now doubly dear and doubly great, and with her the tradition of the past. She was, as he gathered from her silence, like himself, retired from the world, absorbed in grief; but he was assured of her constancy and truth. Even the kind of distance between them in age and sex, in mind and character, was no barrier to this sympathetic relation. She was there with the expectation that makes heroism possible; she was there to watch, if not to further his enterprise, and to give it lustre with her praise. We are often quite unconscious of the commanding influence exerted on our life by those who are least in contact with it. To be cognizant of one steadfast and stainless soul is to have e

s face d

lidity and c

visage, as aga

t-sick at

est Hamlet had himself applied. Even then the first paroxysm has hardly subsided. You see the whole being