Miss Ophelia

“ 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 snow-flake 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. ”

“ With true-love showers."
Whose drowned face comes to us so freshly across the dead centuries, while the echo of her sweet voice singing, "Lord, we know what we are; but we know not what we may be," lives in our hearts with all our household words and treasures. I always think of Ophelia as a slender maiden, with far-away dreamy grey eyes, that saw Death beckoning to her, in strange and lovely guise, down among the rushes, and to whom she went gaily decked with flowers, as a bride to her bridegroom. I wonder if Ophelia had long hair, and whether it was golden, or yellow, or brown like mine? ”

“ As day does to your eye.
A noise within: 'Let her come in.'
Laer. How now? What noise is that?
Enter Ophelia.
O heat, dry up my brains! Tears seven times salt
Burn out the sense and virtue of mine eye!
By heaven, thy madness shall be paid by weight
Till our scale turn the beam. O rose of May!
Dear maid, kind sister, sweet Ophelia!
O heavens! is't possible a young maid's wits
Should be as mortal as an old man's life?
Nature is fine in love, and where 'tis fine,
It sends some precious instance of itself
After the thing it loves. ”

“ She glanced up as the man entered, and closed the book in her lap with an affectation of languor. If the sister’s virago-like methods had kindled the man’s temper, Ophelia’s mood chilled him into a pillar of intellect. It was easily discernible that Ophelia had petrified her mind for the ordeal. There was to be no passionate rhetoric, no pleading, no elevation of sentimentalism. The man read her temper as he gazed at her brilliant eyes and firm white face. ”

“ Such a woman as Portia would have studied him; Juliet would have pitied him; Rosalind would have turned him over with a smile to the melancholy Jacques; Beatrice would have laughed at him outright; Isabel would have reasoned with him; Miranda could but have wondered at him: but Ophelia loves him. Ophelia, the young, fair, inexperienced girl, facile to every impression, fond in her simplicity, and credulous in her innocence, loves Hamlet ”

“ 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. ”

“ And in the love and the fate of Ophelia herself there was introduced an element, not of deep tragedy but of pathetic beauty, which makes the analysis of her character seem almost a desecration.
Ophelia is plainly quite young and inexperienced. She has lost her mother, and has only a father and a brother, affectionate but worldly, to take care of her. Everyone in the drama who has any heart is drawn to her. To the persons in the play, as to the readers of it, she brings the thought of flowers. ‘Rose of May’ Laertes names her. ”

“ Ophelia had ridden to many a meet, sitting her thoroughbred like a queen, and staring full in the whole world’s face. There was no wavering of her vivid eyes, no tinge of discomfort upon her cheeks. Had she not been proved an honest woman, one who had been wronged and whom the law had righted? A fair dame she seemed with her coat buttoned tight over her smooth, full bust, her rich hair closely plaited under her hat. Men saw that Maltravers was often beside her, twirling his mustachios, staring in her face. ”

“ One never meets with such bathos of sentiment as this in the real insane, nor in the insane characters of the great master. Ophelia's prettinesses are as natural as they are touching. The freshness of reality encircles her head like the wild flowers with which she weaves her garlands. This fantastical dress of straws and flowers is a common habit of the insane, but it seems more natural in Ophelia than in the angry and raging madness of old Lear, in whom it is also represented. The picture of her insanity is perfected by many other touches as natural and true. ”

“ I have acted Ophelia three times with my father, and each time, in that beautiful scene where his madness and his love gush forth together like a torrent swollen with storms, that bears a thousand blossoms on its troubled waters, I have experienced such deep emotion as hardly to be able to speak. ”

“ And pray restrain Ophelia from the commission of suicide by joining a nunnery; but do not save her life to put her to a trade that turns upon any other knack than simple beauty. A woman who can enthrall a Hamlet will esteem it no derogation to pluck from his memory a rooted sorrow. It is a profession quite as sanative as Helena's, whose father had taught her the use of curious drugs, and bequeathed to her "prescriptions of rare and prov'd effects." But let Ophelia be simply beautiful, be surprising like the first May-flowers, be winning like unobtrusive violets ”

“ Up to this time Ophelia had kept silence. She despised the wretched Famcram too much to condescend to answer his taunts. If death was to be met, she would meet it like a true daughter of Pigspud, and her ancient lineage should never be disgraced by her behaviour.
But, at this extreme moment, a ray of hope darted suddenly into her heart. Where was she? Upon the very spot where she had received the mystic jar which had worked for her such wonders. ”

“ "But I want it done now," said Miss Ophelia.
"What's your hurry?"
"Because now is the only time there ever is to do a thing in," said Miss Ophelia. ”

“ Every Hyacinth of them knew her exact place in nature's garden—all except Mary Conners—now Ophelia—and she knew herself to be a foundling with no place at all. The lonely woman who had adopted her was now dead and Mary was quite alone in her little two-room tenement, free to dream and play Ophelia to her heart's content and to an imaginary Hamlet who was always Burgess. ”

“ She thought she would take time to think of it; and, by the way of gaining time, and in hopes of some indefinite moral virtues supposed to be inherent in dark closets, Miss Ophelia shut Topsy up in one till she had arranged her ideas further on the subject.
"I don't see," said Miss Ophelia to St. Clare, "how I'm going to manage that child, without whipping her."
"Well, whip her, then, to your heart's content; I'll give you full power to do what you like."
"Children always have to be whipped," said Miss Ophelia ”

“ There were so many of Miss Ophelia's kids I could tell it was going to take nearly two benches to hold them. Wallace Goode's mama and her sister got up and moved across the aisle to another bench so the Lawsons would have plenty of room. Miss Ophelia sort of bowed and told them, "Much obliged, much obliged," over and over.
Finally, she got all the young'uns in place and Miss Dink settled, and she sat down on the front slat of their bench. I thought she would lean back and start smiling and talking to the folks around her, the same as everybody else. She didn't. ”

“ "Now is all the time I have anything to do with," said Miss Ophelia. ”

“ It was universally agreed, among all the household, from Dinah down to the youngest urchin, that Miss Ophelia was decidedly "curis,"—a term by which a southern servant implies that his or her betters don't exactly suit them.
The higher circle in the family—to wit, Adolph, Jane and Rosa—agreed that she was no lady; ladies never keep working about as she did,—that she had no air at all; and they were surprised that she should be any relation of the St. Clares. Even Marie declared that it was absolutely fatiguing to see Cousin Ophelia always so busy. ”

“ I recalled the best Ophelia I had ever seen—a German actress. Would she do for a model? Perhaps—no! she was mystic, strange, aloof!
Oh, dear! and then, by merest accident, my mind wandered away to the past, and I said to myself, it should not be so hard. Every woman has been innocent. I was innocent enough when my first sweetheart paused at my side to say to me the foolish old words that never lose sweetness and novelty. ”

“ It is the tender lady, the maiden with the delicate bloom of love and the remote [Pg 341] ness of it,—the impalpable Ophelia. To detain and handle is impossible, not because, like some rare sphinx-moth, the downy wings flutter into hiding; for she is motionless as a stain of color, restful as a summer afternoon when all the noises sleep: she is a sentiment that broods without a stir upon the lofty Hamlet; she gives no sound to challenge your attention, and is unable to goad her exquisite reserve into any marked behavior. ”

“ It was pleasant to sit upon her throne and see smiling faces round her, and foolish and unkind in Hamlet to persist in grieving for his father instead of marrying Ophelia and making everything comfortable. She was fond of Ophelia and genuinely attached to her son (though willing to see her lover exclude him from the throne) ; and, no doubt, she considered equality of rank a mere trifle compared with the claims of love. The belief at the bottom of her heart was that the world is a place constructed simply that people may be happy in it in a good-humoured sensual fashion. ”

“ Even the union of Othello and Desdemona, in every other respect a ‘marriage of true minds’ which reaches for a moment (ii. 1) incomparable intensity and beauty, is rendered fatally precarious by their ignorance of each other.
Love, like everything else which grows in Hamlet’s Denmark, is touched with insidious disease. Ophelia is wonderfully imagined in keeping with the tragic atmosphere, an exquisite but fragile flower of the unweeded garden where evil things run to seed and good things wither. ”

“ This was the funeral of the young and beautiful Ophelia, his once dear mistress. The wits of this young lady had begun to turn ever since her poor father's death. That he should die a violent death, and by the hands of the prince whom she loved, so affected this tender young maid, that in a little time she grew perfectly distracted, and would go about giving flowers away to the ladies of the court, and saying that they were for her father's burial, singing songs about love and about death, and sometimes such as had no meaning at all, as if she had no memory of what happened to her. ”

“ Mrs. TREE's Ophelia sane, is charming. Her distraught Ophelia is very mad indeed, and her method in her madness is excellent.
"I am thy Father's Ghost!"
There is a curious monotony in some of the stage-business. Thus, Ophelia pauses in her exit and comes up quietly behind the absent-minded Prince as if to play bo-peep with him: then, later on, after his apparently brutal treatment of her, Hamlet returns, and, while he is stooping and in tears, he kisses her hair and runs away noiselessly as if this also were another part of the same game. ”

“ Whatever the reasons might be, the fact remained that Maltravers was less Ophelia’s hero than he had been when she was Gabriel’s wife. Possibly she had expected too much from a man whose vigorous egoism clashed with her own. Such a passion as theirs was utterly selfish, and as such was doomed to no true consummation.
Ophelia was the last woman in the world to abide a rival, even in the minor matter of dress. Moreover, she had always considered Miss Mabel Saker as a protégée and a disciple, a foil to her own more lavish beauty. ”

“ Type of the greater number stands Ophelia, poor, weak, and not very refined, yet honest, and, in all her poverty, immeasurably superior to father and brother.
Christina's condescension had by this time dwindled almost to the vanishing-point, and her talk was in consequence more natural: the company, conversation, and whole atmosphere of the young men, tended to wake in the girls what was best and sweetest. Reality appeals at once to the real, opens the way for a soul to emerge from the fog of the commonplace, the marsh of platitude, the Sahara of lies, into the colour and air of life. ”

“ Paraphernalia was especially vehement in her expressions of regret, vowing that she had always entertained the greatest affection for Ophelia, and that if some demon had not possessed her, she should never have acted as she had done. Her sisters made various protestations of the same sort, whilst Euphemia and Araminta stood with blushing cheeks and downcast eyes awaiting the queen's decision. ”

“ Clare is a singular man," said Marie to Miss Ophelia, in a complaining tone. "I used to think, if there was anything in the world he did love, it was our dear little Eva; but he seems to be forgetting her very easily. I cannot ever get him to talk about her. I really did think he would show more feeling!"
"Still waters run deepest, they used to tell me," said Miss Ophelia, oracularly.
"O, I don't believe in such things; it's all talk. If people have feeling, they will show it,—they can't help it ”