Ophel

“ They were, however, a little cautious in their expressions and demeanour for fear of causing an insurrection in Ophel, and therefore only endeavoured to drive the inhabitants away from those parts of the village which Jesus was obliged to cross.
When the cruel soldiers who led our Lord were near the gates of Ophel he again fell, and appeared unable to proceed a step farther, upon which one among them, being moved to compassion, said to another, 'You see the poor man is perfectly exhausted, he cannot support himself with the weight of his chains ”

“ The procession started again, and reached the gate of Ophel. Here Jesus was again saluted by the cries of grief and sympathy of those who owed him so much gratitude, and the soldiers had considerable difficulty in keeping back the men and women who crowded round from all parts. They clasped their hands, fell on their knees, lamented, and exclaimed, 'Release this man unto us, release him! Who will assist, who will console us, who will cure our diseases? Release him unto us!' It was indeed heart-rending to look upon Jesus ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ The junction of the Ophel wall at the south-east corner serves to identify this angle of the Haram, with the corresponding angle of Herod’s Temple enclosure. The west wall has been examined for nearly half its length, and proves to be of the same{184} style as that on the south-east. Finally, in 1873, I found the same masonry, in the north corner of the west wall, reaching up to a higher level than that at which it was previously known in any other part of the Haram, and founded on rock. ”

“ The town indeed has the appearance of sliding downhill towards the south-east, the Ophel spur being the lowest of those covered by the city at its time of greatest magnitude, when Jerusalem—including the 30 acres of the Temple enclosure—covered about 300 acres in all, being half as large again as the present city within the Turkish walls. The lowest rock stratum, which appears in the low cliffs on the east side of the Kidron, is a hard dolomitic limestone, impervious and forming the bed for streams which sink through the more porous upper limestone. ”

“ Siloam; and “Solomon’s Pool” was the Kidron spring—the Gihon where he was anointed. Ophla is the Aramaic form of the Hebrew Ophel, and the course of the wall here coincides with the line of fortification discovered by Sir Charles Warren. As to the second wall, the description is brief because the wall was short in extent. The junction with Antonia must have been at the north-west angle of that fortress, for the great115 counterscarp of the fosse which defended it on the north is known to continue some way west of the fortress, thus forming the counterscarp of the north wall as well. ”

“ 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 ”

“ The high-priest was found hidden in the aqueduct tunnel and was killed, which roused his son Eleazar to attack Menahem, who fled to Ophel. Metellius, the Roman commander, reduced to extremities when one of the towers of the western fortress had been undermined, at length was forced to treat with Eleazar. The Romans laid down their shields and swords, but some were then slain, and others compelled to become Jews. There seems to have been no more than a single cohort (perhaps 1,000 men) in the city, which thus fell entirely into the hands of the fanatical party. ”

“ 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. ”

“ They all had swords, some of them being also armed with spears, and they carried sticks with lanterns and torches; but when they set off they only lighted one. It had at first been intended that Judas should be accompanied by a more numerous escort, but he drew their attention to the fact that so large a number of men would be too easily seen, because Mount Olivet commanded a view of the whole valley. Most of the soldiers remained, therefore, at Ophel, and sentinels were stationed on all sides to put down any attempt which might be made to release Jesus. ”

“ 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 ”

“ A small valley, commencing on the north near Herod's Gate, runs into the city, and terminates at the Pool of Bethesda, thus dividing Bezetha into two parts. Inside the city it can hardly be distinguished, owing to the quantity of rubbish by [Pg 21] which it has been filled up. Its existence however is proved by the water-courses that descend from the east slope of the western part of Bezetha.
Let us now proceed to examine the exterior of the city. Ophel or Ophlas is to the south of the Haram-es-Sherîf. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ This is all that I have been able to gather about the northern part of the first line of walls; excavations being impossible, from the nature of the place, and still more of the inhabitants.
On the west, the first wall started from Hippicus and "extended through a place called Bethso to the gate of the Essenes, and after that it went southward, having its bending above the fountain of Siloam, where it also bends again to the east at Solomon's pool, and reaches as far as a certain place which they called Ophlas (Ophel) , where it was joined to the eastern cloister of the Temple [118] ." ”

“ 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. ”

“ It is archness playing over kindness that is presented here." On her Ophelia, Mr. Winter remarks: "Ophelia is an image, or personification of innocent, delirious, feminine youth and beauty, and she passes before us in the two stages of sanity and delirium. The embodiment is fully within Miss Terry's reach, and is one of the few unmistakably perfect creations with which dramatic art has illumined literature and adorned the stage." ”

“ 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. ”

“ I do not see how An Oppressed Ophelia can be made a safe investment without your entire assistance. Possibly we may treat about your next novel, which I understand you to say is called An English Hamlet, on other terms. In the meanwhile, let us hope that An Oppressed Ophelia will be successful. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Miss Ophelia was old, and skilled in the tactics of nursing. She was from New England, and knew well the first guileful footsteps of that soft, insidious disease, which sweeps away so many of the fairest and loveliest, and, before one fibre of life seems broken, seals them irrevocably for death.
She had noted the slight, dry cough, the daily brightening cheek; nor could the lustre of the eye, and the airy buoyancy born of fever, deceive her.
She tried to communicate her fears to St. Clare; but he threw back her suggestions with a restless petulance, unlike his usual careless good-humor. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Besides its intrinsic loveliness, the character of Ophelia has a relative beauty and delicacy when considered in relation to that of Hamlet, which is the delineation of a man of genius in contest with the powers of this world. ”

“ The Best Ophelia of My Life
When I played Ophelia for the first time in Chicago, I played the part better than I had ever played it before, and I don't believe I ever played it so well again. Why, it is almost impossible to say. I had heard a good deal of the crime of Chicago, that the people were a rough, murderous, sand-bagging crew. I ran on to the stage in the mad scene, and never have I felt such sympathy. This frail wraith, this poor demented thing could hold them in the hollow of her hand! The audience seemed to me like wine that I could drink, or spill upon the ground.... ”

“ "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. ”

“ 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. ”