"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 lover: he was always "ill at such numbers. His emotion smouldered underneath all the refinements of intellect and conscience, and rarely gleamed through the scruples of his will. When it did gain a moment's mastery, as in that scene of surrendering love,--
"He raised a sigh so piteous and profound, That it did seem to shatter all his bulk, And end his being,"
it palsied the tongue, and only advertised itself in the pathetic eyes which fell to such perusal of Ophelia's face, "and to the last bended their light" on her.
Let us try to conceive the situation at the grave. Hamlet has been absent in England during Ophelia's distraction. Returning, he strolls into a churchyard, amuses himself with the old grave-digger, withdraws aside when the train approaches, so as not to be recognized by the King. Then comes the discovery that Ophelia is dead. There was always in Hamlet's brain that time allowed for the transit of a message between his feeling and his deed. The line connected with a great many intermediate tracts, in each of which there was delay. Nothing but an unsyllabled fluid of conjecture passed all along the way. Dead? How? Was that glad girl the one to take her own life? Why? There was just time enough for him to hear that confession of his mother,--