We can see at once that no other claim to the command of his spirit is likely to succeed. His mind is already haunted. No Ghost can be more spiritual than his own thoughts, or more spectral than the world around him. No revelation of a particular crime can rival the revelation lately made to him of sin in the most holy place--the seat of virtue itself and heavenly purity. He may acknowledge the ties of filial obedience and the duty of revenge, but there is no place, nor obligation to hold, no world to which it may be attached, no faith or interest strong enough within him to give it vitality, no fruit of good result to be looked for without. The place is occupied: "For where the greater malady is fixed The lesser scarce is felt." When Hamlet says, "There is nothing good or bad, but thinking makes it so," he confesses himself an idealist--that is, one to whom ideas are not images or opinions, but the avenues of life. They garner up happiness and they store the harvest of pain; they make the "majestical roof fretted with golden fire" and the "pestilential cloud." The basis on which Hamlet's happiness had rested had been suddenly removed, and with the sanctity of the past the promise of the future had disappeared; the sky and the earth. He could say to his mother: "Du hast sie zerstört Die schöne Welt;" but the new world is built of the same materials--that is, absorbing ideas. The shadow descends till it measures the former brightness; the revulsion is as great as the enthusiasm. IV. Why, then, does he accept the mission of the Ghost? To answer this fully we must accompany him to the platform. In this scene Hamlet exhibits in perfection all the elements of courage--coolness, determination, daring. He is singularly free from excitement; and this is not because he is absorbed in his own thoughts, for he easily falls into conversation, and treats the first subject that comes to hand with his usual felicity and fulness, rising from the private instance to a public law, and applying it to large and larger groups of facts till his father's spirit stands before him. Thrilled and startled he pauses not, "harrowed with fear and wonder like Horatio on the previous night, but at once addresses it, as he said he would, though hell itself should gape." No more dignified rebuke ever shamed terror from the soul than Hamlet administers to his panic-stricken friends, and when they would forcibly withhold him from following the Ghost, the steady determination with which he draws his sword is marked by the play upon words: "By Heav'n, I'll make a ghost of him that lets me." In the presence of his father the old life is rekindled within his filial awe and affection, unquestioned obedience, daring resolve. He will "sweep to his revenge," "And thy commandment all alone shall live Within the book and volume of my brain, Unmixed with baser matter." And this commandment had forbidden him to taint his mind against his mother.