In the eye of man, or in the sunset clouds, from the sobs of literature, or those of the half-spent tempest, can he fail to read the secrets of fate and time, of an over-credulous hope, a too much bewailed disappointment? Will not a very slight hint convey to the mind in which the nobler faculties are at all developed, a sense of the earthquakes which may in a moment upheave his vineyard and whelm his cottage beneath rivers of fire. Can the poet at any time, like the stupid rich man, say to his soul, “Eat, drink, and be merry.” No, he must ever say to his fellow man, as Menelaus to his kingly brother,
“Shall my affairs
Go pleasantly, while thine are full of woe?”
Oh, never could Wordsworth fail, beside his peaceful lake, to know the tempests of the ocean. And to an equable temperament sorrow seems sadder than it really is, for such know less of the pleasures of resistance.
It needs not that one of deeply thoughtful mind be passionate, to divine all the secrets of passion. Thought is a bee that cannot miss those flowers.
Think you that if Hamlet had held exactly the position best fitted to his nature, had his thoughts become acts, without any violent willing of his own, had a great people paid life-long homage to his design, had he never detected the baseness of his mother, nor found cause to suspect the untimely fate of his father, had that “rose of May, the sweet Ophelia,” bloomed safely at his side, and Horatio always been near, with his understanding mind and spotless hands, do you think all this could have preserved Hamlet from the astounding discovery that
“A man may smile, and smile, and be a villain?”
That line, once written on his tables, would have required the commentary of many years for its explanation.
