There is no weakness in the ghost. It is but to the imperfect
human sense that he is shadowy. To himself he knows his doom his
deliverance; that the hell in which he finds himself shall endure but
until it has burnt up the hell he has found within him--until the evil
he was and is capable of shall have dropped from him into the lake of
fire; he nerves himself to bear. And the cry of revenge that comes from
the sorrowful lips is the cry of a king and a Dane rather than of a
wronged man. It is for public justice and not individual vengeance he
calls. He cannot endure that the royal bed of Denmark should be a couch
for luxury and damned incest. To stay this he would bring the murderer
to justice. There is a worse wrong, for which he seeks no revenge: it
involves his wife; and there comes in love, and love knows no amends but
amendment, seeks only the repentance tenfold more needful to the wronger
than the wronged. It is not alone the father's care for the human nature
of his son that warns him to take no measures against his mother; it is
the husband's tenderness also for her who once lay in his bosom. The
murdered brother, the dethroned king, the dishonoured husband, the
tormented sinner, is yet a gentle ghost.
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