He had been compelled to acknowledge that there “are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of" in this philosophy. Still this form of speculation was the habit of the mind, and whether in antic disposition of madness, or in earnest converse with his friend it is found his frequent topic.
Might not this habit of dwelling upon the material laws to which our flesh is subject, have been resorted to as a kind of
antidote to those “thoughts beyond the reaches of the soul,” to which his father's apparition had given rise, his father, whose “bones had burst their cerements,” whose sepulchre
had ope'd its ponderous jaws to cast him up again. Was not this materialist speculation a struggle against these thoughts, and akin to the unconscious protest against the Ghost, that beyond the grave is “The undiscover'd country, from whose bourn No traveller returns.”
Alas for Hamlet ! What with his material philosophy and his spiritual experiences, there was contention enough in that region of the intellect which abuts upon veneration, to un hinge the soundest judgment; let alone the grief, and shame, and just anger, of which his uncle's crimes and his mother's frailty were the more than sufficient cause, in so sensitive a mind.
In the following scene with the captain of the army of Fortinbras, we have a comment upon the folly of useless war, and an occasion for another fine motive-weighing soliloquy ; like the prayer scene, useless indeed to the progress of the piece, but exquisite in itself. Never does Shakespeare seem to have found a character so suited to give noble utterance to his own most profound meditations as in Hamlet. It is on this account that we unconsciously personify Shakespeare in this character, as we personify Byron in Childe Harold, or Sterne in Yorick, and, may we not add, Goëthe in Faust. The soliloquy, “How all things do inform against me,”
