Page:Wit, humor, and Shakspeare. Twelve essays (IA cu31924013161223).pdf/296

 where stimulus becomes inebriation. He not only despises the abrupt effects which are darlings of the modern pen, but he resolutely refuses to represent abruptness; and his fancy makes its rapid time by even and placid motion; as a great sea-bird, with outstretched wings, in which you scarcely can detect a winnow, will follow the speed of your ship and be seen constantly poised just above the stern. All his figures have the same breadth and floating quality: they take you, as on an expanse of Fortunatus's carpet, upon a great journey silently. They are not apothecary's expedients to raise a blister by sharp surprise, to lash up a jaded taste by some cantharides of metaphor and simile, to rouse a torpid skin by acupuncture, or dull a heavy pain by injected morphia, as our modern practitioners of the ideal do, who have abused tired Nature's sweet restorer and the digestion that should wait on appetite.

And every gesture of Shakspeare, even when he has violence to describe, is not violently made; but the most tremendous deeds are emphasized by having their bluster chidden and their outcry hushed; so the great midnight lifts a finger of silence, but shudders none the less, and sinks to awful depths with the crime which has fastened itself upon her secrecy, as if to drag her dumbly out of the sweet heaven down to a place of horror. While Macbeth goes to Duncan's chamber, and the wife listens to hear death follow, the verse turns over the business of shrieking to the owl: an elemental dread from the unsounded depth of human feeling puts an accent on the scene.