The old songs which Ophelia had picked up by no means decide that she was passionate enough to justify so much advice on the point. Some nurse who crooned over her, some book of old ballads, such as Autolycus might leave at the door, was responsible for the scraps which floated into her unconscious girlhood. It frequently happens to an unwary, half developed youth that things not excessive in decorum get established in the memory. They are kept strenuously secret, unless something demoralizes the brain. When madness tears her modesty all to tatters, they escape, and wander without a rag of clothing through her talk. They do not betray that she was ever less than a true lady. She rebukes Hamlet during the mock play, when the expectation of unmasking the king ferments in him with the flightiest remarks, and his tongue rides a steeple-chase over the bounds of courtesy. She will not listen, and says to him, "You are naught, you are naught: I'll mark the play." However, she knows her lord to be a gentleman; for she has often silently felt the effluence of an honest man whose manners and morals were noble. She pays no consideration to the family caution. It is noteworthy how Shakspeare defends Ophelia from our censure while she is chanting those free ditties of an olden time. We listen to them in company with the pitying King and Queen: the air seems to gather pity to tone the rude surprise. She was naturally full of sensibility; so, when she enters in the first mad scene, entirely insensible to her misfortune, it both increases our sadness and calls upon us to create what should be her sane feeling. When that is done, the songs borrow all the chasteness of misfortune. We are absorbed in sorrow to see how distraction could violate her sacred privacy: thinking more of that than of the words, the coarseness eludes us. We are all bound up in the brother's feeling at this sight, who cries,-- "O rose of May! Dear maid, kind sister, sweet Ophelia!" And the King says, "How do you, pretty lady?" Yes, that she is, through it all. If she had her wits, and were using them to persuade us to revenge her, it could not move like these piteous, tender improprieties. "Thought and affliction, passion, hell itself, She turns to favor and to prettiness." For she sings without smirching a single petal of the daisies and pansies, which she so softly distributes, with such an appeal of forlornness, to bid their fragrance disinfect her language, or to speak for her in the natural key of her wonted maidenhood. So every heart exhales in the pity that plays the magic of distance and softens the unsightliness of her ruin.