Page:The Psychology of Shakespeare.pdf/30

Rh The sting of remorse extorts from him the direct expression of regret:

“To know my deed, 'twere best not know myself.” “Wake Duncan with thy knocking: Would thow could'st 1”

Compare this with the woman's firmer nerve, rebuking him : “You do unbend your noble strength, to think So brainsickly of things.”

“Infirm of purpose Give me the daggers: The sleeping, and the dead,

Are but as pictures; 'tis the eye of childhood That fears a painted devil.” She enters the murder chamber, to do that which her mate

dare not do ; and shewing her hands, gilded like the faces of the grooms with Duncan's blood, says: “My hands are of your colour; but I shame To wear a heart so white.”

And this is the lady whom Mr. Coleridge describes as coura geous in fancy only The passage, “Methought I heard a voice,” &c., is scarcely to be accepted as another instance of hallucination; an hallu cination of hearing parallel to that of sight in the appearance of the dagger. It is rather an instance of merely excited imagination without sensual representation, like the “sugges tion whose horrid image” is spoken of on Fores heath. The word “methought” is sufficient to distinguish this voice of the fancy from an hallucination of sense. The-lengthened reasoning of the fancied speech is also unlike an hallucination of hearing; real hallucinations of hearing being almost always restricted to two or three words, or at furthest, to brief sen

tences. How exquisite is this description of sleep ! How correct, psychologically, is the threat that remorse will murder sleep ! How true the prediction to the course of the drama, in which we find that hereafter the murderer did “lack the

season of all natures, sleep !”