d the imagery like
sudden flashes of lightning: all the foregoing extracts exhibit this,
but I will venture one more, as an immediate illustration.

MACBETH.

My dearest love,
Duncan comes here to-night.

LADY MACBETH.

And when goes hence?

MACBETH.

To-morrow,--as he purposes.

LADY MACBETH.

O never
Shall sun that morrow see!
Thy face, my thane, is as a book, where men
May read strange matters;--to beguile the time,
Look like the time; bear welcome in your eye
Your tongue, your hand; look like the innocent flower,
But be the serpent under it.

What would not the firmness, the self-command, the enthusiasm, the
intellect, the ardent affections of this woman have performed, if
properly directed? but the object being unworthy of the effort, the end
is disappointment, despair, and death.

The power of religion could alone have controlled such a mind; but it is
the misery of a very proud, strong, and gifted spirit, without sense of
religion, that instead of looking upward to find a superior, looks
round and sees all things as subject to itself. Lady Macbeth is placed
in a dark, ignorant, iron age; her powerful intellect is slightly tinged
with its credulity and superstition, but she has no religious feeling to
restrain the force of will. She is a stern fatalist in principle and
action--"what is done, is done," and would be done over again under the
same circumstances; her remorse is without repentance, or any reference
to an offended Deity; it arises from the pang of a wounded conscience,
the recoil of the violated feelings of nature: it is the horror of the
past, not the terror of the future; the torture of self-condemnation,
not the fear of judgment; it is strong as her soul, deep as her guilt,
fatal as her resolve, and terrible as her crime.

If it should be objected to this view of Lady Macbeth's character, that
it engages our sympathies in behalf of a perverted being--and that to
leave her so strong a power upon our feelings in the midst of such
supreme wickedness, involves a moral wrong, I can only reply in the
words of Dr. Channing, that "in this and the like cases our interest
fastens on what is _not_ evil in the character--that there is something
kindling and ennobling in the consc