be love or jealousy, or a new faith, or a terrible
doubt. It draws away the life from other duties and interests, and
leaves them pale and semi-vital. Men thus possessed acknowledge the
duties they evade, let slip occasion, are "lapsed in time and passion,"
and are surprised at their own oblivion.

This happens again to Hamlet as he is leaving Denmark. His own inaction
is flashed back upon him by the sight of the gallant array of
Fortinbras, and his first words--

"How all occasions do inform against me,"

disclose that the duty of revenge has its obligations and sanctions, not
in the inward but the outward world; not in the genius of the
man--secret, individual, detached--but in the outward mind of inherited
opinion and ancestral creed, that we share with others in unreflecting
fellowship. The world has charge of it, and reflects it back upon him
new in the actor's tears, and now--

"In this army of such mass and charge,
Led by a delicate and tender prince."

This speech must be read, like a Spartan despatch, on the [Greek:
skutale] or counterpart of Hamlet's personality. He begins, as after the
player's recitation, with a confession, and ends with an excuse. He is
startled into an avowal, which he qualifies by a subtle
after-thought--"What is a man," he cries, who acts as I have acted, who
allows

"That capability and god-like reason,
To fust in him unused?"

"A beast, no more." But as he looks at Fortinbras and his soldiers,
another thought strikes him. These men act because they do not pause to
think. I must have been thinking, _not too little, but too much_; and
with that he turns short round upon his first confession, escapes from
the charge of "bestial oblivion," and takes refuge in an imaginary
"thinking too precisely on the event;" which indeed, as he remembers,
had more than once prevented him taking his own life. But he condemns
himself without cause; he cannot now return to that earlier stage of
unreasoning activity in appointed paths, and the joy and grace of
unconscious obedience.

When Hamlet returns from England, he takes Horatio apart to recount his
adventures and unfold the plot of the king; but before he utters a word
of this his settled mood is revealed to us in the graveyard scene.
Hamlet, ever prone to belittle the world, is not loth to watch the
making of a grave. There is the limit and boundary of what can be done
or suffered; there the triumph is ended, and there the e