Or perhaps he has heard the black
cock crow, and is wanted beneath: his turn has come.
Will the fires ever cleanse _her_? Will his love ever lift him above the
pain of its loss? Will eternity ever be bliss, ever be endurable to poor
_King Hamlet?_
Alas! even the memory of the poor ghost is insulted. Night after night
on the stage his effigy appears--cadaverous, sepulchral--no longer as
Shakspere must have represented him, aerial, shadowy, gracious, the thin
corporeal husk of an eternal--shall I say ineffaceable?--sorrow! It is
no hollow monotone that can rightly upbear such words as his, but a
sound mingled of distance and wind in the pine-tops, of agony and love,
of horror and hope and loss and judgment--a voice of endless and
sweetest inflection, yet with a shuddering echo in it as from the caves
of memory, on whose walls, are written the eternal blazon that must not
be to ears of flesh and blood. The spirit that can assume form at will
must surely be able to bend that form to completest and most delicate
expression, and the part of the ghost in the play offers work worthy of
the highest artist. The would-be actor takes from it vitality and
motion, endowing it instead with the rigidity of death, as if the soul
had resumed its cast-off garment, the stiffened and mouldy corpse--whose
frozen deadness it could ill model to the utterance of its lively will!
ON POLISH.
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