[Footnote 78: I have heard an actress in this part utter such a cry as is described above, but there is absolutely nothing in the text to justify her rendering. Even the exclamation 'O, ho!' found in the Quartos at IV. v. 33, but omitted in the Folios and by almost all modern editors, coming as it does after the stanza, 'He is dead and gone, lady,' evidently expresses grief, not terror.] [Footnote 79: In the remarks above I have not attempted, of course, a complete view of the character, which has often been well described; but I cannot forbear a reference to one point which I do not remember to have seen noticed. In the Nunnery-scene Ophelia's first words pathetically betray her own feeling: Good my lord, How does your honour _for this many a day_? She then offers to return Hamlet's presents. This has not been suggested to her by her father: it is her own thought. And the next lines, in which she refers to the sweet words which accompanied those gifts, and to the unkindness which has succeeded that kindness, imply a reproach. So again do those most touching little speeches: _Hamlet._ ... I did love you once. _Ophelia._ Indeed, my lord, you made me believe so. _Hamlet._ You should not have believed me ... I loved you not. _Ophelia._ I was the more deceived. Now the obvious surface fact was not that Hamlet had forsaken her, but that _she_ had repulsed _him_; and here, with his usual unobtrusive subtlety, Shakespeare shows how Ophelia, even though she may have accepted from her elders the theory that her unkindness has driven Hamlet mad, knows within herself that she is forsaken, and cannot repress the timid attempt to win her lover back by showing that her own heart is unchanged. I will add one note. There are critics who, after all the help given them in different ways by Goethe and Coleridge and Mrs. Jameson, still shake their heads over Ophelia's song, 'To-morrow is Saint Valentine's day.' Probably they are incurable, but they may be asked to consider that Shakespeare makes Desdemona, 'as chaste as ice, as pure as snow,' sing an old song containing the line, If I court moe women, you'll couch with moe men.] [Footnote 80: _I.e._ the King will kill _her_ to make all sure.] [Footnote 81: I do not rely so much on his own statement to Laertes (IV. vii. 12 f.) as on the absence of contrary indications, on his tone in speaking to her, and on such signs as his mention of her in soliloquy (III. iii. 55).] [Footnote 82: This also is quietly indicated. Hamlet spares the King, he says, because if the King is killed praying he will _go to heaven_. On Hamlet's departure, the King rises from his knees, and mutters: My words fly up, my thoughts remain below: Words without thoughts _never to heaven go_.] [Footnote 83: I am indebted to Werder in this paragraph.] [Footnote 84: The attempt to explain this meeting as pre-arranged by Hamlet is scarcely worth mention.]