A sweet-faced, blue-eyed damsel of L

was recently strolling along one of the suburban walks of her native village, when she suddenly met a young farmer on horseback, carrying a pig in front of him. As soon as the young lady saw him, she burst into tears. The young man naturally inquired the cause. Whereupon she replied: "I'm so afraid you might kiss me." This of course aroused the young gentleman's indignation, and he cried out in not a very gentlemanlike tone: "You fool! How do you expect me to hold the pig and kiss you too?" This was a poser, but the young lady soon cleared away the difficulty by sobbing out: "Oh, I'll hold the pig." It is said that the pig rolled over and remained perfectly still for half an hour out of sheer sympathy. We turned away in jealous rage. We heard the first smack and then quoted savagely the words of the poet:

O Love, O fire! once he drew

With one long kiss my whole soul through
My lips, as sunlight drinketh dew.

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T is with reverential awe and anxious solicitude that we approach this, one of the greatest, if not the very greatest, of Shakspeare's masterly delineations. We are like the bashful lover that stands trembling by with downcast eyes. He hears his mistress' silvery voice and sees her sparkling eyes, and despairs of ever possessing so much loveliness. Yet the fascination of her beauty causes him still to linger, and he is fain to make his pabulum from a few smiles of the many which affect thousands with entrancement and delight. In such a spirit do we approach this play of Shakspeare. We hope not to intercept and enjoy the full benefit of all the dazzling beains that emanate from his effulgent sun. But if a wandering ray or two, falling upon the camera obscura of our mind's eye, leave an image not remarkable for clearness or distinctness, still we shall be satisfied. Vain, indeed, would we be to imagine that we had fully comprehended Hamlet. A small mind can never fully understand or appreciate the productions of a great one. About all works of genius there is a sort of sacred glamor, an indescribable, inapproachable something, peculiarly their own, which meaner authors never attain; or, if they do, it is only at favored moments, and their inspiration

comes and goes like the fitful fever of a dream.

Like the expelled Peri at the gates of Eden, we hear the ravishing music within and catch glimpses of radiant forms, but for us the happy portals are forever closed.

We are not like a great many who believe that Shakspeare, when he meditated writing a piece for his theater, sat down and, after having fixed on some great object to be accomplished, bent all his energies to that end. On the contrary, we think that, being guided in the main by facts found in Saxo Grammaticus, or his translators, he begun this play with no definite end in view, but that, the matter growing under his hand, he from time to time introduced those powerful agencies which make the story a thrilling one of madness and of love. This we believe, both from the nature of the plot, in the complexity of which it was not possible for the author to foresee every trivial incident that was to befall each of his characters, or at what time a change for the better in his conception of any one of them might be happily made. This opinion is still further confirmed by the two very different characters given to Polonius. In the earlier stages of the play, he is represented as a wise and judicious states nan, giving to his son counsel such as would have done honor to the masculine mind of a Tully or a Cato. But further on le degenerates into a miserable scholastic pedant, prostituting his great abilities in mere word-trickery. The explanations of those editors who seek to remove otherwise this inconsistency in the character of Polonius are, it seems to us, more specious than true, more ingenious than exponential of sound judgment. But that Shakspeare was principally guided by the historical facts, may be gathered from the closing scenes of the play, where strict poetical justice is not meted out, the guilty King and Queen being punished only by accident, and Hamlet perishing at the same time.

The three great agencies employed in this play are the ghost, madness and love. As regards its efficiency in producing dramatic effect, the ghost yields to neither of the others. Man will not willingly believe that his fellow-man perishes like the swine, or that the future for himself is oblivion; and,

inasmuch as he has never been able, even by the insatiable desire, which he manifests, of prying into things unknown and obscure, to fathom the mysteries of death, he naturally invests it with all the awful terrors which are either conjured up by a fertile imagination, or suggested by the superstitious tales and legends handed down by successive generations. The most favorite form taken by these superstitions is that which relates to ghosts, or the appearance of spirits of persons deceased. Strangely enough, while reports of these appearances are comparatively common, yet any particular instance of such a supposed appearance is esteemed a prodigy; and while even according to the vulgar theory, ghosts appear only on extraordinary occasions, they are looked for with fear and trepidation in every corner and dark place, and at all times. However little foundation these pretended appearances may have, they have at times exerted great power over the minds even of persons of unusual intellectual ability, and correspondingly more on the mind of the ignorant multitude. To trace this influence in its different degrees through historical times, would be to form an interesting chapter in the history of the superstitious weakness of the human race. This influence, often acting as an unanswerable argument in completing conviction, confirming resolution, or augmenting fear, seems to be derived from the mysterious horrors associated with the tomb. Man, however he may theorize on the abstract, can never avoid all consideration of the concrete. We cannot imagine a ghost without at the same time reverting to the dead body of the tomb. We can imagine the worms wriggling through the sockets of the eyes and passing from one part to another. Being unable to see how this is able to manifest any vital power, we fear a something all the more terrible from being undefined, since few of us can feel with Hamlet in the first part of his remark, or trust sufficiently in the second, when he says, on his friends dissuading him from following whither the ghost led:

"I do not set my life at a pin's fee;
And, for my soul, what can it do to that,
Being a thing immortal as itself?"

A grinning skull, though we know the life that animated it has long since fled, has about it a sort of fascination, as it were, which irresistibly engages the attention. Men love to speak with bated breath of unsubstantial shadows that haunt the night, but flee away at the first rays of dawn, take delight in recounting how,

"In the most high and palmy state of Rome,

A little ere the mightiest Julius fell,

The graves stood tenantless, and the sheeted dead
Did squeak and gibber in the Roman streets."

It follows that, into whatever this occult agency is judiciously introduced, it cannot fail to be productive of great effects. Shakspeare was deeply versed in all the hopes and fears of a superstitious humanity. It was not to be supposed that he would not utilize so powerful an agency. But to return.

It has been said that the story of Hamlet is the history of a moral poisoning. To understand this it is necessary for us to come to a just appreciation of the character of Hamlet, as depicted by our author. His is a delicate nature, and so keen are his susceptibilities that a hair in one of the scales will disturb the balance of his mind. Reared by a fond parent in the cultivation and indulgence of his refined tastes, he had not yet experienced the stern realities of life. Accustomed to order and beauty in the moral world, the crime of his mother appeared as a monstrous deformity exaggeratel ten-fold. To Hamlet, his mother seemed not only criminal, but wholly wicked and unnatural. To him she appears as a wife that had murdered her husband, and before two months had elapsed, so eager was she to "post to incestuous sheets," had married that husband's brother, the accomplice of her crime. But the unnatural wife appeared to him in another light. She was his mother. We are able to look upon the vileness of others with a certain degree of indifference; but when we suddenly discover deep baseness in parents and kinsmen, we are in great danger of losing faith in ourselves and in mankind in general. Prepared beforehand by such an insight, IIamlet sees none but hypocrites and villains. His uncle is a villain, an arch-villain;