"Oh, step between her and her fighting soul!
Speak to her, Hamlet."
And an arrowy current from a long accumulating heart sweeps through the midnight hours. Then, by the light of the succeeding day, we observe that Hamlet's mind has recovered its strain of irony: it passes for the flightiness that gets him despatched to England, where all the people are as mad as he. But Hamlet's nerves, though delicately spun, are spun of some toughness that never snaps nor ravels. His pulse "doth temperately keep time, and makes as healthful music" as any man's.
Throughout the play, a refined superiority is the keynote of his character. The "heavy-headed revel" of the Danes seems to him a custom "more honored in the breach than the observance," though he is to the manner born and has a head not easily overthrown. He says to his fellow-students, "We'll teach you to drink deep ere you depart." But he keeps himself aloof from contracting a habit. The same speech contains traces of the observation exercised by a soul that is sustained by the sound pith of virtue. It often chances, he says, that one vicious mole of nature is the fly in the ointment of the apothecary, and undoes all the noble substance. His tendency to speculate upon suicide belongs to a mind in which conscience is so supreme and strong that its ideal makes life scarcely tolerable. But there is no feeble whimper in the tone, nor when his friends are trying to dissuade him from following the ghost; he routs them and all our cowardice at once:
"Why, what should be the fear?
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?"
Yes, we—already the ghosts—are a match for any ghost. Self-poised and self-sufficing, his ambition is to occupy the kingdom of a mind. "O God! I could be bounded in a nut-shell, and count myself a king of infinite space." And, in the midst of the torrent that bursts from him to overwhelm his mother, there is that smooth, still eddy, "Forgive me this my virtue," and all the stars of his soul look down into it.
Shakspeare plainly meant us to infer that Hamlet had inherited the traits of a noble father: for who but such a son could describe with impetuous remembrance the kingly qualities which had given birth to him? In his mind's eye, he could always see this father:—
"Look here, upon this picture, and on this:
See what a grace was seated on this brow!
A combination and a form, indeed,
Where every god did seem to set his seal,
To give the world assurance of a man.
This was your husband."
He is that man's son, and not his mother's.
"Ha! have you eyes?"
What devil was it that made you seize upon this other man in a game of blindfold?