They resent the waking of such doubt. Any attempt at
the raising in them of their buried best they regard as an offence
against intercourse. A man takes his social life in his hand who dares
it. Few therefore understand the judgment of Hamlet upon himself; the
common reader is so incapable of imagining he could mean it of his own
general character as a man, that he attributes the utterance to shame
for the postponement of a vengeance, which indeed he must have been such
as his critic to be capable of performing upon no better proof than he
had yet had. When the man whose unfolding I would now represent, regards
even his dearest love, he finds it such a poor, selfish, low-lived
thing, that in his heart he shames himself before his children and his
friends. How little labour, how little watching, how little pain has he
endured for their sakes! He reads of great things in this kind, but in
himself he does not find them. How often has he not been wrongfully
displeased--wrathful with the innocent! How often has he not hurt a
heart more tender than his own! Has he ever once been faithful to the
height of his ideal? Is his life on the whole a thing to regard with
complacency, or to be troubled exceedingly concerning? Beyond him rise
and spread infinite seeming possibilities--height beyond height, glory
beyond glory, each rooted in and rising from his conscious being, but
alas! where is any hope of ascending them? These hills of peace, "in a
season of calm weather," seem to surround and infold him, as a land in
which he could dwell at ease and at home: surely among them lies the
place of his birth!--while against their purity and grandeur the being
of his consciousness shows miserable--dark, weak, and undefined--a
shadow that would fain be substance--a dream that would gladly be born
into the light of reality.
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