Page:Wit, humor, and Shakspeare. Twelve essays (IA cu31924013161223).pdf/428

 began henceforth to outface Fate. Not so this soul, who has known "how tender 'tis to love the babe" that milks her.

"The tackle of her heart is crack'd and burned; And all the shrouds wherewith her life should sail Are turned to one thread, one little hair."

She will soon be "a clod and module of confounded royalty."

For she has been the cause of all; she has thus changed and compromised the man whom she hoped to help to majesty and safety; she, the determined guider of the first blow, must see that wound become a widening crack in the walls of love and honor, to bury what she hoped to shelter; and she has grown powerless to shore them up, or to let them fall upon herself and not upon him. The breaking heart pulls down her wits into its ruin.

Her undaunted mettle was but the over-bracing tonic of a moment, which punishes the structure it exalted.

"A little water clears us of this deed: How easy is it, then!"

So she and Heaven differed; and the husband found it was not easy. A piteous self-arraignment of love is quite as potent to destroy her as a conscience that can sleep no more.

Night after night, her gentlewomen attend the repetition of scenes which she enacts, like a shadowy pageant in Hades of bygone life. Sleep's hammer tolls the castle-bell: "One, two! why, then 'tis time to do't." How Duncan bleeds! Who would have thought it of