hed: we rather sigh
over the ruin than exult in it; and after watching her through this
wonderful scene with a sort of fascination, we dismiss the unconscious,
helpless, despair-stricken murderess, with a feeling which Lady Macbeth,
in her waking strength, with all her awe-commanding powers about her,
could never have excited.

It is here especially we perceive that sweetness of nature which in
Shakspeare went hand in hand with his astonishing powers. He never
confounds that line of demarcation which eternally separates good from
evil, yet he never places evil before us without exciting in some way a
consciousness of the opposite good which shall balance and relieve it.

I do deny that he has represented in Lady Macbeth a woman "_naturally
cruel_,"[116] "_invariably savage_,"[117] or endued with "_pure demoniac
firmness_."[118] If ever there could have existed a woman to whom such
phrases could apply--a woman without touch of modesty, pity or
fear,--Shakspeare knew that a thing so monstrous was unfit for all the
purposes of poetry. If Lady Macbeth had been _naturally_ cruel, she
needed not so solemnly to have abjured all pity, and called on the
spirits that wait on mortal thoughts to _unsex_ her; nor would she have
been loved to excess by a man of Macbeth's character; for it is the
sense of intellectual energy and strength of will overpowering her
feminine nature, which draws from him that burst of intense admiration--

Bring forth men children only,
For thy undaunted metal should compose
Nothing but males.

If she had been _invariably_ savage, her love would not have comforted
and sustained her husband in his despair, nor would her uplifted dagger
have been arrested by a dear and venerable image rising between her soul
and its fell purpose. If endued with _pure demoniac firmness_, her
woman's nature would not, by the reaction, have been so horribly
avenged, she would not have died of remorse and despair.

* * * * *

We cannot but observe that through the whole of the dialogue
appropriated to Lady Macbeth, there is something very peculiar and
characteristic in the turn of expression: her compliments, when she is
playing the hostess or the queen, are elaborately elegant and
verbose: but, when in earnest, she speaks in short energetic
sentences--sometimes abrupt, but always full of meaning; her thoughts
are rapid and clear, her expressions forcible, an