It is plain that Hamlet looked forward to a life of activity under his father's guidance. He was no dreamer--we hear of "the great love the general gender bear him," and the people are not fond of dreamers. In truth, the Germans have had too much their own way with Hamlet, and have read into him something of their own laboriousness and phlegm. But Hamlet was more of a poet than a professor. He had the temperament of a man of genius--impatient, animated, eager, swift to feel, to like or dislike, praise or resent--with a character of rapidity in all his actions, and even in his meditation, of which he is conscious when he says, "as swift as meditation." He did not live apart as a student, but in public as a prince-- "the observed of all observers;" he was of a free, open, unsuspicious temper-- "remiss, Most generous and free from all contriving." He was fond of all martial exercises and expert in the use of the sword. He was a soldier first, a scholar afterwards; a soldier in his alacrity to fight "Until his eyelids would no longer wag;" a soldier even to "The glass of fashion, and the mould of form;" and, above all, a soldier in his sensibility on the point of honour, one who would think it well "Greatly to find quarrel in a straw, When honour is at stake." And Fortinbras, type of the man of action, recognized in him a kindred spirit-- "Bear Hamlet, like a soldier, to the stage; For he was likely, had he been put on, To have proved most royally;" while Hamlet eyed Fortinbras with the envious longing of one who had missed his career. What must have been the felicity of life to such a man, whose vivacity no stress of calamity, no accumulation of sorrow could tame, whose enthusiasm embraced Nature, art, and literature, and whose delight was always fresh and new, "in this excellent canopy the air, in this brave o'erhanging firmament,"' and in the spectacle of man "so excellent in faculty, in form and moving so express and admirable, in action how like an angel, in apprehension how like a god?"