has no thought to link his terrible
destiny with hers: he cannot marry her: he cannot reveal to her, young,
gentle, innocent as she is, the terrific influences which have changed
the whole current of his life and purposes. In his distraction he
overacts the painful part to which he had tasked himself; he is like
that judge of the Areopagus, who being occupied with graver matters,
flung from him the little bird which had sought refuge in his bosom, and
with such angry violence, that unwittingly he killed it.

In the scene with Hamlet,[42] in which he madly outrages her and
upbraids himself, Ophelia says very little: there are two short
sentences in which she replies to his wild, abrupt discourse:--

HAMLET.

I did love you once.

OPHELIA.

Indeed, my lord, you made me believe so.

HAMLET.

You should not have believed me: for virtue cannot so
inocculate our old stock, but we shall relish of it. I loved
you not.

OPHELIA.

I was the more deceived.

Those who ever heard Mrs. Siddons read the play of Hamlet, cannot forget
the world of meaning, of love, of sorrow, of despair, conveyed in these
two simple phrases. Here, and in the soliloquy afterwards, where she
says,--

And I of ladies most deject and wretched,
That sucked the honey of his music vows,

are the only allusions to herself and her own feelings in the course of
the play; and these, uttered almost without consciousness on her own
part, contain the revelation of a life of love, and disclose the secret
burthen of a heart bursting with its own unuttered grief. She believes
Hamlet crazed; she is repulsed, she is forsaken, she is outraged, where
she had bestowed her young heart, with all its hopes and wishes; her
father is slain by the hand of her lover, as it is supposed, in a
paroxysm of insanity: she is entangled inextricably in a web of horrors
which she cannot even comprehend, and the result seems inevitable.

Of her subsequent madness, what can be said? What an affecting--what an
astonishing picture of a mind utterly, hopelessly wrecked!--past
hope--past cure! There is the frenzy of excited passion--there is the
madness caused by intense and continued thought--there is the delirium
of fevered nerves; but Ophelia's madness is distinct from these: it is
not the suspension, but the utter destruction of the reasoni