But it is at an earlier stage of this impression, when the thought of this profanation of the sacredness of life and the sanctity of love chills the life-blood of his heart, and then rushes burning through it like the shame of a personal insult, that he first stands before us in the palace of the King. In appearance nothing is changed. He sees the same crowd, the same obsequious attitudes, the same decorous forms; the trumpets with their usual flourish announce the arrival of the King and Queen; the Ministers of State precede them, and the Court ladies; the pretentious gravity of Polonius' brow; the dreamy innocence of Ophelia. The sovereigns seat themselves, the Queen looks smilingly around her as of old. All is easy, bright, and festive. All goes on as if this horrible revolution were the most natural thing in the world. Oh, that he could avoid the sight of it! Oh, that he could be quit of it all! "Oh! that this too too solid flesh would melt, Thaw, and resolve itself into a dew; Or that the Everlasting had not fixed His canon 'gainst self-slaughter!" Although the nervous horror of his address to the Ghost is greater, there is no speech in which Hamlet betrays so deep an agitation as in this. He struggles for utterance, repeats himself, mingles oaths and axioms, confuses and then annihilates time in the breathless tumult of his soul. "Why, she, _even she_. O Heaven!" What can he say? what is vile enough? "A _beast_ "that wants discourse of reason, Would have mourned longer--married with my uncle." In this opening speech we see at once the immediate relation of the feeling of life-weariness so prevalent throughout the play to this supreme emotion; we see also his comprehensive criticism of the world branching from the same root-- "How weary, stale, flat, and unprofitable Seems to me all the uses of this world! Fie, on't! O fie! 'tis an unweeded garden;" and "Frailty, thy name is woman." These themes are developed Act by Act, we can follow them to the graveyard scene, and to the moment before death.