tremendous, let us observe that _now_ the conditions have arisen under
which Hamlet's highest endowments, his moral sensibility and his genius,
become his enemies. A nature morally blunter would have felt even so
dreadful a revelation less keenly. A slower and more limited and
positive mind might not have extended so widely through its world the
disgust and disbelief that have entered it. But Hamlet has the
imagination which, for evil as well as good, feels and sees all things
in one. Thought is the element of his life, and his thought is
infected. He cannot prevent himself from probing and lacerating the
wound in his soul. One idea, full of peril, holds him fast, and he cries
out in agony at it, but is impotent to free himself ('Must I remember?'
'Let me not think on't'). And when, with the fading of his passion, the
vividness of this idea abates, it does so only to leave behind a
boundless weariness and a sick longing for death.

And this is the time which his fate chooses. In this hour of uttermost
weakness, this sinking of his whole being towards annihilation, there
comes on him, bursting the bounds of the natural world with a shock of
astonishment and terror, the revelation of his mother's adultery and his
father's murder, and, with this, the demand on him, in the name of
everything dearest and most sacred, to arise and act. And for a moment,
though his brain reels and totters,[46] his soul leaps up in passion to
answer this demand. But it comes too late. It does but strike home the
last rivet in the melancholy which holds him bound.

The time is out of joint! O cursed spite
That ever I was born to set it right,--

so he mutters within an hour of the moment when he vowed to give his
life to the duty of revenge; and the rest of the story exhibits his vain