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must pass self-withdrawn into a deep syncope and suspension of earthly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.

Oh! 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 discoveries, the more
we shall see proofs of design and self-supporting arrangement where
the careless eye had seen nothing but accident!

N.B. In the above specimen of psychological criticism, I have
purposely omitted to notice another use of the knocking at the gate,
viz. the opposition and contrast which it produces in the porter's
comments to the scenes immediately preceding; because this use is
tolerably obvious to all who are accustomed to reflect on what they
read.

_De Quincey._