am on a willow branch,
forgive his erring mother as more sinned against than sinning, welcome
Laertes back to Denmark, and with the Ghost of his father blessing the
whole group, and Polonius with his arm in a sling, severely but not
fatally wounded, form the sort of stage picture, as the curtain went
down, that has sent audiences home, dissolved in happy tears, from so
many theatres. But Shakespeare, being a dramatist as well as a
playwright, learned from Hamlet himself that Hamlet could not end as he
had meant him to end. Hamlet, in fact, could not really end at all, and,
in the sort of anticlimax in which the tragedy closes, he must rise from
death, another and a truer ghost than the buried majesty of Denmark, and
walk the world forever.

Could Eugenio, however, advise his youthful correspondents to work so
reckless of their original conceptions as Shakespeare had probably done?
The question was serious; it put him upon his conscience, and he decided
that at the most he could not do more than urge them, with all the
earnestness of his nature, to write their _Hamlets_ from the beginning
forward, and never from the ending backward, even in their own minds. He
saw that if he were to answer them collectively (and he certainly did
not intend to answer them severally) he must say that their only hope of
producing an effective whole was through indefatigable work upon every
part. Make each smallest detail beautiful, and despise none because it
seemed to perform a poor and lowly office in the assemblage of the
parts. Let these youths be sure that they could not know the meaning of
any design from imagining it, but only from expressing it, and that the
true result could come only from the process. They could not hope to
outdo Shakespeare and foreknow their respective _Hamlets_; they must
slowly make their _Hamlets_' acquaintance by living with them.

If Eugenio's correspondents were dashed by this hard saying, he thought
he might raise their spirits by adding that they would find compensation
for their slow, arduous toil in particulars from a fact which he had
noted in his own case. A thing well done looks always very much better
in the retrospect than could have been hoped. A good piece of work would
smile radiantly upon them when it was accomplished. Besides, after a
certain experience in doing, they would learn that the greatest
happiness which could come to them from their work would be through the
perfecting of details.