Ghost. Do not forget: this visitation
Is but to whet thy almost blunted purpose.
But, look! amazement on thy mother sits:
O, step between her and her fighting soul;
Conceit* in weakest bodies strongest works;
Speak to her, Hamlet.

Ham.

How is it with you, lady?

Queen. Alas! how is't with you?

That you do bend your eye on vacancy,

And with the incorporeal air do hold discourse?
Forth at your eyes your spirits wildly peep;
And, as the sleeping soldiers in the alarm,

* Imagination.

Your bedded hair, like life in excrements,*
Starts up, and stands on end. O gentle son,
Upon the heat and flame of thy distemper
Sprinkle cool patience. Whereon do you look ?

Ham. On him! On him! Look you, how pale he
glares!

His form and cause conjoin'd, preaching to stones,
Would make them capable.+-Do not look upon me;
Lest, with this piteous action, you convert
My stern effects: then what I have to do

Will want true colour; tears, perchance, for blood.
Queen. To whom do you speak this?

Ham.

Do you see nothing there?

Queen. Nothing at all; yet all that is I see.
Ham. Nor did you nothing hear?

Queen.

No, nothing, but ourselves.

Ham. Why look you there! look, how it steals away! My father, in his habit as he lived!

Look, where he goes, even now, out at the portal!

[Exit Ghost.

Queen. This is the very coinage of your brain:
This bodiless creation ecstasy §

My pulse, as yours, doth temperately keep time,
And makes as healthful music: it is not madness
That I have utter'd: bring me to the test,
And I the matter will re-word; which madness
Would gambol from. Mother, for love of grace,
Lay not that flattering unction to your soul,
That not your trespass, but my madness speaks:
It will but skin and film the ulcerous place;
Whiles rank corruption, mining all within,

*The hair of animals is excrementitious; that is, without life or sensation.

† Intelligent.

+ Actions.

Frenzy.

Infects unseen.

Confess yourself to Heaven;

Repent what's past; avoid what is to come;

And do not spread the compost* on the weeds,

To make them ranker. Forgive me this my virtue: For in the fatness of these pursy times,

Virtue itself of vice must pardon beg;

Yea, curbt and woo, for leave to do him good.

Queen. O Hamlet! thou hast cleft my heart in

twain.

Ham. Then throw away the worser part of it,

And live the purer with the other half.

Good night, but go not to my uncle's bed;
Assume a virtue, if you have it not.

That monster, custom, who all sense doth eat,
Of habit's devil, is angel yet in this;
That to the use of actions fair and good
He likewise gives a frock, or livery,
That aptly is put on: refrain to-night:
And that shall lend a kind of easiness

To the next abstinence: the next more easy :
For use almost can change the stamp of nature,
And either curb the devil, or throw him out
With wondrous potency. Once more, good night!
And when you are desirous to be bless'd,
I'll blessing beg of you.-For this same lord,

[Pointing to Polonius.

I do repent: but Heaven hath pleased it so
To punish me with this, and this with me,
That I must be their scourge and minister.
I will bestow him, and will answer well
The death I gave him. So, again, good night!
I must be cruel, only to be kind:

Thus bad begins, and worse remains behind.

SORROWS RARELY SINGLE.

O Gertrude, Gertrude,

When sorrows come, they come not single spies,
But in battalions!

THE DIVINITY OF KINGS.

Let him go, Gertrude; do not fear our person;
There's such divinity doth hedge a king,

That treason can but peep to what it would,
Acts little of his will.

DESCRIPTION OF OPHELIA'S DEATH.

Queen. There is a willow grows ascaunt the brook, That shows his hoar leaves in the glassy stream; Therewith fantastic garlands did she make

Of crow-flowers, nettles, daisies, and long purples,
That liberal shepherds give a grosser name,
But our cold maids do dead men's fingers call them:
There on the pendent boughs her coronet weeds,
Clambering to hang, an envious sliver broke;
When down her weedy trophies and herself,

Fell in the weeping brook. Her clothes spread wide;
And, mermaid-like, awhile they bore her up:
Which time, she chanted snatches of old tunes;
As one incapable of her own distress,

Or like a creature native and indued

Unto that element; but long it could not be,
Till that her garments, heavy with their drink,
Pull'd the poor wretch from her melodious lay
To muddy death.

OPHELIA'S INTERMENT.

Lay her i' the earth;

And from her fair and unpolluted flesh,

*Licentious.

+ Insensible.

May violets spring!-I tell thee, churlish priest,
A minist'ring angel shall my sister be,
When thou liest howling.

This same

Grave-digger. A pestilence on him for a mad rogue! he poured a flagon of Rhenish on my head once. skull, sir, was Yorick's skull, the king's jester.

Ham. This ?

Grave-digger. E'en that.

[Takes the skull.

Ham. Alas poor Yorick !-I knew him, Horatio: a fellow of infinite jest; of most excellent fancy; he hath borne me on his back a thousand times; and now, how abhorred in