Thus in every instance in which Hamlet comes in contact with Ophelia, or refers to her, his actions and his words consistently point to the fact that he renounces her because he believes her to have thrust him aside while engaging in an intrigue with the King. And the fact that from this point of view there is a connected story of their relations told by the several interviews above discussed, that Hamlet's conduct and language in them all are adequately explained, and that a single belief of his accounts for each of them, is strong confirmation of the theory's correctness. It is in harmony with the general scheme of the drama also, all of whose important movements hinge on "purposes mistook"; and it furnishes Hamlet with an adequate motive for his treatment of Ophelia, and removes from him the stigma of mere brutishness or insanity. Coleridge well says that there must have been "some profound heart truth" under the story, and the theory herein advanced seems to disclose it. _David A. McKnight_. Washington, D. C., February 26, 1898. * * * * * CLEWS TO EMERSON'S MYSTIC VERSE. (Third Paper.) "When a man's verses cannot be understood, nor a man's good wit seconded with the forward child understanding, it strikes a man more dead than a great reckoning in a little room."--_Touchstone_. The phantasmal lords of life of the poem 'Experience,' which we considered at the close of the last paper, were presumably suggested to Emerson by the following lines from Tennyson's 'Mystic,' published in 1830 (Emerson imported these early volumets of young Tennyson, and never tired of praising them to his friends):-- "Always there stood before him, night and day, Of wayward vary-colored circumstance The imperishable presences serene, Colossal, without form, or sense, or sound, Dim shadows but unwaning presences Four-faced to four corners of the sky." The "silent congregated hours," "daughters of time, divinely tall," with "severe and youthful brows," in this same poem of Tennyson gave Emerson his "daughters of Time, the hypocritic Days," congregated in procession. Tennyson's mystic, who hears "time flowing in the middle of the night" recalls Emerson's 'Two Rivers,' in which the living All, the Infinite Soul, is figured as a stream flowing through eternity:-- "I hear the spending of the stream, Through years, through men, through nature fleet, Through love and thought, through power and dream."