M ANNA BROWNELL JAMESON (1794-1860) RS. JAMESON, whose "Characteristics of Women" has become a classic, was born in Dublin, May 17th, 1794. Her father, D. Brownell Murphy, was a miniature-painter, no wealthier than artists generally are, and his daughter began life at the age of sixteen as a governess in the family of the Marquis of Winchester. In 1825 she married Robert Jameson, a lawyer, with whom she did not live long. He went as a judge to Jamaica, while she remained at home to pursue her career as an authoress. Her "Characteristics of Women" appeared in 1832, her "Sacred and Legendary Art" from 1848 to 1852, and her "Miscellaneous Essays" in 1846. She wrote also "Celebrated Female Sovereigns" and a number of other works which were once widely read. She died in Middlesex, England, March 17th, 1860. PHELIA OPHELIA, POOR OPHELIA -poor Ophelia! O far too soft, too good, too fair, to be cast among the briers of this working-day world, and fall and bleed upon the thorns of life! What shall be said of her? for eloquence is mute before her! Like a strain of sad sweet music, which comes floating by us on the wings of night and silence, and which we rather feel than hear -like the exhalation of the violet dying even upon the sense it charms-like the snowflake dissolved in air before it has caught a stain of earth-like the light surf severed from the billow, which a breath disperses-such is the character of Ophelia; so exquisitely delicate, it seems as if a touch would profane it; so sanctified in our thoughts by the last and worst of human woes, that we scarcely dare to consider it too deeply. The love of Ophelia, which she never once confesses, is like a secret which we have stolen from her, and which ought to die upon our hearts as upon her own. Her sorrow asks not words, but tears; and her madness has precisely the same effect that would be produced by the spectacle of real insanity, if brought before us: we feel inclined to turn away and veil our eyes in reverential pity and too painful sympathy. Beyond every character that Shakespeare has drawn (Hamlet alone excepted) that of Ophelia makes us forget the poet in his own creation. Whenever we bring it to mind it is with the same exclusive sense of her real existence, without reference to the wondrous power which called her into life. The effect (and what an effect!) is produced by means so simple, by strokes so few, and so unobtrusive, that we take no thought of them. It is so purely natural and unsophisticated, yet so profound in its pathos, that, Hazlitt observes, it takes us back to the old ballads - we forget that, in its perfect artlessness, it is the supreme and consummate triumph of art. The situation of Ophelia in the story is that of a young girl who, at an early age, is brought from a life of privacy into the circle of the court- a court such as we read of in those early times, at once rude, magnificent, and corrupted. She is placed immediately about the person of the queen, and is apparently her favorite attendant. The affection of the wicked queen for this gentle and innocent creature is one of those beautiful redeeming touches, one of those penetrating glances into the secret springs of natural and feminine feeling, which we find only in Shakespeare. Gertrude, who is not so wholly abandoned but that there remains within her heart some sense of the virtues she has forfeited, seems to look with a kind yet melancholy complacency on the lovely being she has destined for the bride of her son; and the scene in which she is introduced as scattering flowers on the grave of Ophelia is one of those effects of contrast in poetry, in character, and in feeling, at once natural and unexpected which fill the eye and make the heart swell and tremble within itself; like the nightingales singing in the grove of the Furies, in Sophocles. Again, in the father of Ophelia, the Lord Chamberlain Polonius the shrewd, wary, subtle, pompous, garrulous old courtier- have we not the very man who would send his son into the world to see all, learn all it could teach of good and evil, but keep his only daughter as far as possible from every taint of that world he knew so well? So that when she is brought to the court she seems in her loveliness and perfect purity like a seraph that had wandered out of bounds, and yet breathed on earth the air of paradise. When her father and her brother find it necessary to warn her simplicity, give her lessons of worldly wisdom, and instruct her "to be scanter of her maiden presence "; for that Hamlet's vows of love "but breathe like sanctified and pious bonds, the better to beguile"; we feel at once that it comes too late for from the moment she appears on the scene amid the dark conflict of crime and vengeance, and supernatural terrors, we know what must be her destiny. Once at Murano, I saw a dove caught in a tempest; perhaps it was young, and either lacked strength of wing to reach its home, or the instinct which teaches to shun the brooding storm; but so it was- and I watched it, pitying, as it flitted, poor bird! hither and thither, with its silver pinions shining against the black thundercloud, till, after a few giddy whirls, it fell blinded, affrighted, and bewildered into the turbid wave beneath, and was swallowed up forever. It reminded me then of the fate of Ophelia; and now when I think of her, I see again before me that poor dove, beating with weary wing, bewildered amid the storm. It is the helplessness of Ophelia, arising merely from her innocence, and pictured without any indication of weakness, which melts us with such profound pity. She is so young, that neither her mind nor her person have attained maturity; she is not aware of the nature of her own feelings; they are prematurely developed in their full force before she has strength to bear them, and love and grief together rend and shatter the frail texture of her existence, like the burning fluid poured into a crystal vase. She says very little, and what she does say seems rather intended to hide than to reveal the emotions of her heart; yet in those few words we are made as perfectly acquainted with her character, and with what is passing in her mind, as if she had thrown forth her soul with all the glowing eloquence of Juliet. Passion with Juliet seems innate, a part of her being, "as dwells the gathered lightning in the cloud"; and we never fancy her but with the dark splendid eyes and Titian-like complexion of the south. While in Ophelia we recognize as distinctly the pensive, fair-haired, blue-eyed daughter of the north, whose heart seems to vibrate to the passion she has inspired, more conscious of being loved than of loving; and yet, alas! loving in the silent depths of her young heart, far more than she is loved. When the heathen would represent their Jove as clothed in all his Olympian terrors, they mounted him on the back of an eagle, and armed him with the lightnings; but when in Holy Writ the Supreme Being is described as coming in his glory, he is upborne on the wings of cherubim, and his emblem is the dove. Even so our blessed religion, which has revealed deeper mysteries in the human soul than ever were dreamed of by Philosophy till she went hand in hand with Faith, has taught us to pay that worship to the symbols of purity and innocence which in darker times was paid to the manifestations of power; and therefore do I think that the mighty intellect, the capacious, soaring, penetrating genius of Hamlet, may be represented without detracting from its grandeur, as reposing upon the tender virgin innocence of Ophelia, with all that deep delight with which a superior nature contemplates the goodness which is at once perfect in itself, and of itself unconscious. That Hamlet regards Ophelia with this kind of tenderness,- that he loves her with a love as intense as can belong to a nature in which there is (I think) much more of contemplation and sensibility than action or passion,-is the feeling and conviction with which I have always read the play of "Hamlet." As to whether the mind of Hamlet be or be not touched with madness this is another point at issue among critics, philosophers, aye, and physicians. To me it seems that he is not so far disordered as to cease to be a responsible human being; that were too pitiable: but rather that his mind is shaken from its equilibrium, and bewildered by the horrors of his situation,—— horrors, which his fine and subtle intellect, his strong imagination, and his tendency to melancholy, at once exaggerate, and take from him the power either to endure, or "by opposing, end them." We do not see him as a lover, nor as Ophelia first beheld him; for the days when he importuned her with love were before the opening of the drama-before his father's spirit revisited the earth; but we behold him at once in a sea of troubles, of perplexities, of agonies, of terrors; without remorse, he endures all its horrors; without guilt, he endures all its shame. A loathing of the crime he is called on to revenge, which revenge is again abhorrent to his nature, has set him at strife with himself; the supernatural visitation has perturbed his soul to its inmost depths; all things else, all interests, all hopes, all affections, appear as futile, when the majestic shadow comes lamenting from its place of torment "to shake him with thoughts beyond the reaches of his soul!" His love for Ophelia is then ranked by himself among those trivial, fond records which he has deeply sworn to erase from his heart and brain. He has no thought to link his terrible destiny with hers; he cannot marry her; he cannot reveal to her, young, gentle, innocent as she is, the terrific influences which have changed the whole current of his life and purposes. In his distraction, he overacts the painful part to which he had tasked himself; he is like that judge of the Areopagus who, being occupied with graver matters, flung from him the little bird which had sought refuge in his bosom, and with such angry violence, that unwittingly he killed it. In the scene with Hamlet in which he madly outrages and upbraids himself, Ophelia says very little; there are two short sentences in which she replies to his wild, abrupt discourse Hamlet I did love you once. Ophelia - Indeed, my lord, you made me believe so. Hamlet-You should not have believed me: for virtue cannot so inoculate our old stock, but we shall relish of it. I loved you not. Ophelia - I was the more deceived. Those who ever heard Mrs. Siddons read the play of "Hamlet" cannot forget the world of meaning, of love, of sorrow, of despair, conveyed in these two simple phrases. Here, and in the soliloquy afterwards, where she says, "And I of ladies most deject and wretched, are the only allusions to herself and her own feelings in the course of the play; and these, uttered almost without consciousness on her own part, contain the revelation of a life of love, and disclose the secret burthen of a heart bursting with its own unuttered grief. She believes Hamlet crazed; she is repulsed, she is forsaken, she is outraged, where she had bestowed her young heart, with all its hopes and wishes; her father is slain by the hand of her lover, as it is supposed, in a paroxysm of insanity; she is entangled inextricably in a web of horrors which she cannot even comprehend, and the result seems inevitable. Of her subsequent madness what can be said? What an affecting what an astonishing picture of a mind utterly, hopelessly wrecked!-past hope-past cure! There is the frenzy of excited passions - there is the madness caused by intense and continued thought-there is the delirium of fevered nerves: but |