Page:Wit, humor, and Shakspeare. Twelve essays (IA cu31924013161223).pdf/386

 throne, if lips could waft her soldier so far. Her whole soul, imagining him in statelier guises, grows so impatient to speak out its action, that love itself becomes for a moment inarticulate, though it is all the time the life-*blood of her hope; as when he returns to her after the perils of the campaign which overthrew rebellion, her embrace is grave, as if her arms enclosed the coming state: they do not radiate the touch of love. He is not her darling husband, but

"Great Glamis! worthy Cawdor! Greater than both by the all-hail hereafter!"

His letters transported her not only beyond the "ignorant present," but beyond him, away beyond the familiar circle of his arms, to which she had so often committed soul and body,—away so far that she does not feel him. "The future in the instant" is embracing her; and it is against that splendor that her heart-beats break.

The first exclamation which follows the reading of his letter betrays this passionate attachment: "and shalt be what thou art promis'd." There runs through the tone a vibration from her own desire, no doubt; but it is dominated by exulting love, and bursts into a chord. The time has come: he shall, he must be, what he has always longed to be. The weird sisters are in luck when they promised so fairly to a man who is so profoundly loved. 'Tis the good will of Nature that I love him.

Yet she knows him thoroughly. So close is her appraisement of him that she instinctively postpones love to the immediate exigency,—that is, to pour her spirits in his ear, to beat down every thing that might inter