that "here she is allow'd her virgin crants, her maiden strewments," and even a bell! If the sour old ritualist could have had his way, he would have pitched "shards, flints, and pebbles" over her. It is not only pity which increases, but respect, with every line: it takes her part, and magnifies her nature. There must have been more of her than we used to think. So, when the requiem is denied, Laertes pronounces it for all when he says,—
"A minist'ring angel shall my sister be,"
as she always had been. And our sentiment recalls the dominant excellence of her character. If ever the priest himself should come to grief, and lie howling in that place which is paved with good intentions and bad practices, she would be the first to toss him a sprig of "herb o' grace o' Sundays."
When Laertes lets fall the word "sister," Hamlet appears to utter nothing but ordinary surprise,—"What! the fair Ophelia?"—and his action goes no further. Some critics have inferred, from this absence of manifested emotion, that Hamlet never really loved Ophelia, and that his subsequent passionate outbreak was only inspired by pique at seeing Laertes take on so with leaping into the grave as if to fill it with hyperboles of language. It is said that, at the very instant of hearing her name, a lover would have exclaimed bitterly, would have rushed forward into the funeral group to agitate its grief afresh with his own, would have sunk into some gesture of abandonment. Romeo might have improvised such a scene, but Hamlet was a different style of
