[Footnote 6: I understand him to speak this with a kind of lost, mechanical obedience. The description his mother gives of him makes it seem as if the Ghost were drawing his ghost out to himself, and turning his body thereby half dead.]

[Footnote 7: 'as if there were life in excrements.' The nails and hair were 'excrements'—things growing out.]

[Footnote 8: Note the form an end—not on end. 51, 71.]

[Footnote 9: —all spoken coaxingly, as to one in a mad fit. She regards his perturbation as a sudden assault of his ever present malady. One who sees what others cannot see they are always ready to count mad.]

[Footnote 10: able to take, that is, to understand.]

[Footnote 11: —to the Ghost.]

[Footnote 12: 'what is in my power to do.']

[Footnote 13: Note antithesis here: 'your piteous action;' 'my stern effects'—the things, that is, 'which I have to effect.' 'Lest your piteous show convert—change—my stern doing; then what I do will lack true colour; the result may be tears instead of blood; I shall weep instead of striking.']

[Footnote 14: It is one of the constantly recurring delusions of humanity that we see all there is.]

[Page 176]