In _Hamlet_, too, Nature is shocked at man's mis-deeds:
... Such an act (the queen's)
That blurs the grace and blush of modesty
... Heaven's face doth glow,
Yea, this solidity and compound mass
With tristful visage, as against the doom,
Is thought-sick at the act.
But there are other personifications in this most wonderful of all
tragedies, such as the magnificent one:
But look, the dawn, in russet mantle clad.
Walks o'er the dew of yon high eastern hill.
The first player declaims:
But, as we often see, against some storm
A silence in the heavens, the rack stand still,
The bold winds speechless, and the orb below
As hush as death....
Ophelia dies:
When down her weedy trophies and herself
Fell in the weeping brook.
and Laertes commands:
Lay her i' the earth,
And from her fair and unpolluted flesh
May violets spring.
Thus Shakespeare's great imagination gave life and soul to every
detail of Nature, and he obtained the right background for his
dramas, not only through choice of scenery, but by making Nature a
sharer of human impulse, happy with the happy, shuddering in the
presence of wickedness.
He drew every phase of Nature with the individualizing touch which
stamps her own peculiar character, and also brings her into sympathy
with the inner life, often with that poetic intuition which is so
closely allied to mythology.
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