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Irving may act Hamlet well or ill and, for my part, I think he acts it exceedingly well but behind Mr. Irving's Hamlet, as behind everybody else's Hamlet, there looms a greater Hamlet than them all Shakespeare's Hamlet, the real Hamlet. But Mr. Irving's Mathias is quite another kettle of fish, all of Mr. Irving's own catching.
"Yes, dear." "When the cannon cease, I shall fall asleep. Listen! what is that?" "A blackbird singing in the pear-tree." "And what is that that sound of galloping? Look out and see, Helen." "It is a gendarme riding fast towards the Rhine." That evening Dorothy Marche stood on the terrace in the moonlight waving her plumed fan and listening to the orchestra from the hamlet of Saint-Lys.
The farm-yards were perfect pictures of disarray and slovenly administration of home affairs. Only one of these houses had a door opening on the road, and that was the meanest in the hamlet. A flight of narrow stone stairs ascended from the threshold to the second story.
"See where amazement on your mother sits," the ghost remarks in Hamlet, but amazement never sat so hard on the wicked Gertrude of Denmark as it did upon the four men who saw the tablecloth give up its ghosts. At first there was silence. One of those throbbing, abominable silences whose every second makes a situation worse and explanation more impossible.
The next morning I resumed my walk and visited a locality bearing a name and association of world-wide celebrity and interest. It is the name of a small rural hamlet, hardly large enough to be called a village, and marked by no trait of nature or art to give it distinction.
The lowlands and coastal regions have been so commercialized that human pariahs are there almost overlooked but they are at every turning of the road in every hamlet, everywhere.
He made an exquisite choice of a place of residence, the village of Canandaigua, then only a hamlet of log huts along the border of one of the lakes for which that part of the State is famous. The first step taken by the young lawyer after his arrival fixed his destiny. He was assigned by the court to defend a man charged with murder a capital chance for winning distinction in a frontier town.
It had been a favourite point of view of Wordsworth's; his "seat" was pointed out in the grounds. Tennyson had lived for a while close by: his "seat," too, was on the hill above Lanehead. But the cottage needed thorough repair, and that cost more than rebuilding, not to speak of the additions of later years, which have ended by making it into a mansion surrounded by a hamlet.
That is what such men as my miller do instinctively; meanwhile one tries to believe that the melancholy that comes to such as Hamlet, the sadness of finding the world unintelligible, and painful, and full of shadows, is a noble melancholy, a superior sort of madness.
Unless he has changed his name, I should be able to discover him in Paris; and if he turns out to be the man who once lived at Number 2 Long Street, he may be able to tell me something about the Callots; and the Callots, if by a miracle I can find them, may be able to tell me something about Rogers, the Ghost in Hamlet.
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