d Scotland
as a country bleeding and receiving every day a new gash added to her
wounds. It is as if the poet saw the whole story through an ensanguined
mist, and as if it stained the very blackness of the night. When
Macbeth, before Banquo's murder, invokes night to scarf up the tender
eye of pitiful day, and to tear in pieces the great bond that keeps him
pale, even the invisible hand that is to tear the bond is imagined as
covered with blood.

Let us observe another point. The vividness, magnitude, and violence of
the imagery in some of these passages are characteristic of _Macbeth_
almost throughout; and their influence contributes to form its
atmosphere. Images like those of the babe torn smiling from the breast
and dashed to death; of pouring the sweet milk of concord into hell; of
the earth shaking in fever; of the frame of things disjointed; of
sorrows striking heaven on the face, so that it resounds and yells out
like syllables of dolour; of the mind lying in restless ecstasy on a
rack; of the mind full of scorpions; of the tale told by an idiot, full
of sound and fury;--all keep the imagination moving on a 'wild and
violent sea,' while it is scarcely for a moment permitted to dwell on
thoughts of peace and beauty. In its language, as in its action, the
drama is full of tumult and storm. Whenever the Witches are present we
see and hear a thunder-storm: when they are absent we hear of
ship-wrecking storms and direful thunders; of tempests that blow down
trees and churches, castles, palaces and pyramids; of the frightful
hurricane of the night when Duncan was murdered; of the blast on which
pity rides like a new-born babe, or on which Heaven's cherubim are
horsed. There is thus something magnificently appropriate in the cry
'Blow, wind! Come, wrack!' with which Macbeth, turning from the sight of
the moving wood of Birnam, bursts from his castle. He was borne to his
throne on a whirlwind, and the fate he goes to meet comes on the wings
of storm.

Now all these agencies--darkness, the lights and colours that illuminate
it, the storm that rushes through it, the violent and gigantic
images--conspire with the appearances of the Witches and the Ghost to
awaken horror, and in some degree also a supernatural dread. And to this
effect other influences contribute. The pictures called up by the mere
words of the Witches stir the same feelings,--those, for example, of the
spell-bound sailor driven tempest-tost for nine tim