enterprise of great
pith_? Yet less could it be called _of great pitch_.]

[Footnote 2: I allow this to be a general reflection, but surely it
serves to show that _conscience_ must at least be one of Hamlet's
restraints.]

[Footnote 3: --by way of intercession.]

[Footnote 4: Note the entire change of mood from that of the last
soliloquy. The right understanding of this soliloquy is indispensable to
the right understanding of Hamlet. But we are terribly trammelled and
hindered, as in the understanding of Hamlet throughout, so here in the
understanding of his meditation, by traditional assumption. I was roused
to think in the right direction concerning it, by the honoured friend
and relative to whom I have feebly acknowledged my obligation by
dedicating to him this book. I could not at first see it as he saw it:
'Think about it, and you will,' he said. I did think, and by
degrees--not very quickly--my prejudgments thinned, faded, and almost
vanished. I trust I see it now as a whole, and in its true relations,
internal and external--its relations to itself, to the play, and to the
Hamlet, of Shakspere.

Neither in its first verse, then, nor in it anywhere else, do I find
even an allusion to suicide. What Hamlet is referring to in the said
first verse, it is not possible with certainty to determine, for it is
but the vanishing ripple of a preceding ocean of thought, from which he
is just stepping out upon the shore of the articulate. He may have been
plunged in some profound depth of the metaphysics of existence, or he
may have been occupied with the one practical question, that of the
slaying of his uncle, which has, now in one form, now in another,
haunted his spirit for weeks. Perhaps, from the message he has just
received, he expects to meet the king, and conscience, confronting
temptation, has been urging the necessity of proof; perhaps a righteous
consideration of consequences, which sometimes have share in the primary
duty, has been making him shrink afresh from the shedding of blood, for
every thoughtful mind recoils from the irrevocable, and that is an awful
form of the irrevocable. But whatever thought, general or special, this
first verse may be dismissing, we come at once thereafter into the light
of a definite question: 'Which is nobler--to endure evil fortune, or to
oppose it _a outrance_; to bear in passivity, or to resist where
resistance is hopeless--resist to the last--to the death which is its
unavo