rattling
away from the scene, and making known that the transitory vision was
dissolved, he will be aware that at no moment was his sense of the complete
suspension and pause in ordinary human concerns so full and affecting, as
at that moment when the suspension ceases, and the goings-on of human
life are suddenly resumed. All action in any direction is best expounded,
measured, and made apprehensible, by reaction. Now apply this to the case
in Macbeth. Here, as I have said, the retiring of the human heart and the
entrance of the fiendish heart was to be expressed and made sensible.
Another world has stepped in; and the murderers are taken out of the region
of human things, human purposes, human desires. They are transfigured: Lady
Macbeth is "unsexed;" Macbeth has forgot that he was born of woman; both
are conformed to the image of devils; and the world of devils is suddenly
revealed. But how shall this be conveyed and made palpable? In order that a
new world may step in, this world must for a time disappear. The murderers,
and the murder, must be insulated--cut off by an immeasurable gulph
from the ordinary tide and succession of human affairs--locked up and
sequestered in some deep recess; we must be made sensible that the world
of ordinary life is suddenly arrested--laid asleep--tranced--racked into
a dread armistice: time must be annihilated; relation to things without
abolished; and all must pass self-withdrawn into a deep syncope and
suspension of earthly passion. Hence it is, that when the deed is done,
when the work of darkness is perfect, then the world of darkness passes
away like a pageantry in the clouds: the knocking at the gate is heard; and
it makes known audibly that the reaction has commenced: the human has made
its reflux upon the fiendish; the pulses of life are beginning to beat
again; and the re-establishment of the goings-on of the world in which we
live, first makes us profoundly sensible of the awful parenthesis that had
suspended them.

O, mighty poet! Thy works are not as those of other men, simply and merely
great works of art; but are also like the phenomena of nature, like the sun
and the sea, the stars and the flowers,--like frost and snow, rain and dew,
hail-storm and thunder, which are to be studied with entire submission of
our own faculties, and in the perfect faith that in them there can be no
too much or too little, nothing useless or inert--but that, the further
we press in our disco