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into a dread armistice:  time must be annihilated; relation to things without abolished; and all must pass self-withdrawn into a deep syncope and suspension of earthly passion.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 discoveries, the more we shall see proofs of design and self-supporting arrangement where the careless eye had seen nothing but accident!

ON MURDER,

CONSIDERED AS ONE OF THE FINE ARTS.

TO THE EDITOR OF BLACKWOOD’S MAGAZINE.

SIR,—­We have all heard of a Society for the Promotion of Vice, of the Hell-Fire Club, &c.  At Brighton, I think it was, that a Society was formed for the Suppression of Virtue.  That society was itself suppressed—­but I am sorry to say that another exists in London, of a character still more atrocious.  In tendency, it may be denominated a Society for the Encouragement of Murder; but, according to their own delicate [Greek:  euphaemismos], it is styled—­The Society of Connoisseurs in Murder.  They profess to be curious in homicide;