There is, of course, that other element of musical quality, and Hamlet's phrase is delicious for its strange, broken sibilations, but without the _picture_ the alliterations and vowel sounds are but dead things. All the fine, rolling, organ-like sonority of Swinburne's Hymn to Proserpine would be tedious without the impressions of light and colour that palpitate through the lines. For style I can think of no better modern example than the concluding paragraph in Lafcadio Hearn's paper on the dragon-fly in the volume called Kotto: "... then let me hope that the state to which I am destined will not be worse than that of a cicade or of a dragon-fly;--climbing the cryptomerias to clash my tiny cymbals in the sun,--or haunting, _with soundless flicker of amethyst and gold_, some holy silence of lotus pools." October 8. Hamlet. Old Mr. A---- was most interesting to-night at dinner on the subject of the various Hamlets he has seen--apparently every actor of any importance who has attempted the part in the last sixty years; not only the English-speaking ones, but German and French as well. After dwelling upon all manner of details of the varied dress, business, scenery, and so forth, of the different men who have attempted the role, I asked him which of them all he considered to have been the best, and he decided after some hesitation that not one of them satisfied him completely. "Not one of them all," he concluded, "seemed to me to have a clear, comprehensive grasp of the essentials of the part. Each appeared to try to express some one phase of it, but you felt the thing as a whole escaped them." Which is, perhaps, not to be wondered at, since, so far, it appears, as a complete conception, to have escaped every one. No one of the Shakespearian scholars has expressed what definite meaning the play in its entirety conveyed to his mind. Mr. A----'s talk interested me immensely, much more than any of those long-winded mystical triumphs of verbiage the Germans perpetrate. I have seen but two eminent actors in the part. Booth's Hamlet was, of course, only a noble piece of elocution, not an interpretation, and without vitality. Mounet Sully--but then all Frenchmen believe Hamlet mad, despite his express warning to Horatio-- "How strange or odd so'er I bear myself, As I, perchance, hereafter _shall think meet To put an antic disposition on_ ..." And of his confidence to Guildenstern that he is but "Mad nor'-nor'-west. When the wind is southerly I know a hawk from a hernshaw."