idable end?'

Then comes a pause, during which he is thinking--we will not say 'too
precisely on the event,' but taking his account with consequences: the
result appears in the uttered conviction that the extreme possible
consequence, death, is a good and not an evil. Throughout, observe, how
here, as always, he generalizes, himself being to himself but the type
of his race.

Then follows another pause, during which he seems prosecuting the
thought, for he has already commenced further remark in similar strain,
when suddenly a new and awful element introduces itself:

....To die--to sleep.--
--To _sleep_! perchance to _dream_!

He had been thinking of death only as the passing away of the present
with its troubles; here comes the recollection that death has its own
troubles--its own thoughts, its own consciousness: if it be a sleep, it
has its dreams. '_What dreams may come_' means, 'the sort of dreams that
may come'; the emphasis is on the _what_, not on the _may_; there is no
question whether dreams will come, but there is question of the
character of the dreams. This consideration is what makes calamity so
long-lived! 'For who would bear the multiform ills of life'--he alludes
to his own wrongs, but mingles, in his generalizing way, others of those
most common to humanity, and refers to the special cure for some of his
own which was close to his hand--'who would bear these things if he
could, as I can, make his quietus with a bare bodkin'--that is, by
slaying his enemy--'who would then bear them, but that he fears the
future, and the divine judgment upon his life and actions--that
conscience makes a coward of him!'[14]

To run, not the risk of death, but the risks that attend upon and follow
death, Hamlet must be certain of what he is about; he must be sure it is
a right thing he does, or he will leave it undone. Compare his speech,
250, 'Does it not, &c.':--by the time he speaks this speech, he has had
perfect proof, and asserts the righteousness of taking vengeance in
almost an agony of appeal to Horatio.

The more continuous and the more formally logical a soliloquy, the less
natural it is. The logic should be all there, but latent; the bones of
it should not show: they do not show here.]

[Footnote 5: _One_ 'well' _only in Q._]

[Footnote 6: He does not want to take them back, and so sever even that
weak bond between them. He has not given her up.]

[Footnote 7: The _Q._ read