"He is dead and gone, lady,
He is dead and gone;
At his head a grass-green turf,
At his heels a stone.
White his shroud as the mountain snow,
Larded with sweet flowers;
Which bewept to the grave did go,
With true-love showers."
"We must be patient; but I cannot choose but weep to think they should lay him in the cold ground. My brother shall know of it;" and on the strength of that she culls out rosemary for him.
"They bore him bare-fac'd on the bier,
And in his grave rain'd many a tear;
Fare you well, my dove!" says this loyal daughter. We echo it, but with a difference: she is this dove to whom we bid farewell. For already "in the distance one white arm is seen above the tide," clutching at the branches of a willow growing askant a brook; and our pulse premeditates the funeral strain that goes graveward while her Prince is looking "at the skull as though Death had written on it the history of man."
Poor maiden, to be churlishly suspected of making an end of herself, when we know that "an envious sliver broke" and let her into that coffin strewn with flowers,—the tributes, not to womanhood in its capacity to resolve, to outlive destiny, to outdo circumstance with patience, to contrive escapes from disaster, but simply "sweets to the sweet," turned as they were to immortal amaranths when Hamlet's breath endowed them:—
"I loved Ophelia: forty thousand brothers
Could not, with all their quantity of love,
Make up my sum."
Then, too late for her, but not for us, to atone for her chariness of language and action, all her gifted simplicity is revealed to justify the silent past and to ennoble Hamlet for his heart's choice of such an unambitious soul. What freighted her might have kept Hamlet riding on a steady keel upon any ocean that was not phantom-haunted. Death casts up her freight underneath the cliffs of this stern tragedy, and we are wreckers all along the shore to recover strays from the sail that love had chartered.
When the procession enters the churchyard, Hamlet steps aside to be unperceived. There is not a trait in this scene which does not illustrate Ophelia's character, and reflect a tender worth upon it. Hamlet wonders who it is, what person of estate whom they follow, "and with such maimèd rites." When Laertes steps forward, Hamlet praises him to Horatio. This deepens our feeling of his unconsciousness that it is a brother who is burying that beloved sister. 'Tis our common fashion of noting, with slightly raised sympathy, the mourners in a train that bears away nothing particularly dear to us. "What ceremony else?" Nothing more: the stubborn old priest will not venture his own salvation on another word for her whose "death was doubtful." Where he got that notion does not appear in the play. It is like Malcolm's crotchet that Lady Macbeth took herself off "by self and violent hands." But notions are the sheet-anchors of formalists. The priest drops his, swings round, and becomes immovable. He complains, with the whine of a man who has been imposed upon, that "here she is allow'd her virgin crants, her maiden strewments," and even a bell! If the sour old ritualist could have had his way, he would have pitched "shards, flints, and pebbles" over her. It is not only pity which increases, but respect, with every line: it takes her part, and magnifies her nature. There must have been more of her than we used to think. So, when the requiem is denied, Laertes pronounces it for all when he says,—
"A minist'ring angel shall my sister be,"