Have they been merry? which their keepers call
A lightening before death."

There is in Romeo, too, that peculiar mixture of pensive sadness and
loving sympathy which is the very vesture of Hamlet's soul; he says to
"Noble County Paris":

"O, give me thy hand,
One writ with me in sour misfortune's book."

And finally Shakespeare's supreme lyrical gift is used by Romeo as
unconstrainedly as by Hamlet himself. The beauty in the last soliloquy
is of passion rather than of intellect, but in sheer triumphant beauty
some lines of it have never been surpassed:

"Here, here will I remain
With worms that are thy chambermaids; O, here
Will I set up my everlasting rest
And shake the yoke of inauspicious stars
From this world-wearied flesh."

The whole soliloquy and especially the superb epithet "world-wearied"
are at least as suitable to Hamlet as to Romeo. Passion, it is true, is
more accentuated in Romeo, just as there is greater irresolution
combined with intenser self-consciousness in Hamlet, yet all the
qualities of the youthful lover are to be found in the student-prince.
Hamlet is evidently the later finished picture of which Romeo was merely
the charming sketch. Hamlet says he is revengeful and ambitious,
although he is nothing of the kind, and in much the same way Romeo says: