to the fact of Hamlet's melancholy, we may freely admit, or rather may
be anxious to insist, that this pathological condition would excite but
little, if any, tragic interest if it were not the condition of a nature
distinguished by that speculative genius on which the Schlegel-Coleridge
type of theory lays stress. Such theories misinterpret the connection
between that genius and Hamlet's failure, but still it is this
connection which gives to his story its peculiar fascination and makes
it appear (if the phrase may be allowed) as the symbol of a tragic
mystery inherent in human nature. Wherever this mystery touches us,
wherever we are forced to feel the wonder and awe of man's godlike
'apprehension' and his 'thoughts that wander through eternity,' and at
the same time are forced to see him powerless in his petty sphere of
action, and powerless (it would appear) from the very divinity of his
thought, we remember Hamlet. And this is the reason why, in the great
ideal movement which began towards the close of the eighteenth century,
this tragedy acquired a position unique among Shakespeare's dramas, and
shared only by Goethe's _Faust_. It was not that _Hamlet_ is
Shakespeare's greatest tragedy or most perfect work of art; it was that
_Hamlet_ most brings home to us at once the sense of the soul's
infinity, and the sense of the doom which not only circumscribes that
infinity but appears to be its offspring.

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 25: It may be convenient to some readers for the purposes of
this book to have by them a list of Shakespeare's plays, arranged in
periods. No such list, of course, can command general assent, but the
following (which does not throughout represent my own views) would
perhaps meet with as little objection from scholars as any other. For
some purposes the Third and Fourth Periods are better considered to be