as she enters, when she prays the spirits of cruelty so to thicken her blood that pity cannot flow along her veins!  What pictures are those of the murderer appearing at the door of the banquet-room with Banquo’s ‘blood upon his face’; of Banquo himself ’with twenty trenched gashes on his head,’ or ‘blood-bolter’d’ and smiling in derision at his murderer; of Macbeth, gazing at his hand, and watching it dye the whole green ocean red; of Lady Macbeth, gazing at hers, and stretching it away from her face to escape the smell of blood that all the perfumes of Arabia will not subdue!  The most horrible lines in the whole tragedy are those of her shuddering cry, ’Yet who would have thought the old man to have had so much blood in him?’ And it is not only at such moments that these images occur.  Even in the quiet conversation of Malcolm and Macduff, Macbeth is imagined as holding a bloody sceptre, and Scotland as a country bleeding and receiving every day a new gash added to her wounds.  It is as if the poet saw the whole story through an ensanguined mist, and as if it stained the very blackness of the night.  When Macbeth, before Banquo’s murder, invokes night to scarf up the tender eye of pitiful day, and to tear in pieces the great bond that keeps him pale, even the invisible hand that is to tear the bond is imagined as covered with blood.

Let us observe another point.  The vividness, magnitude, and violence of the imagery in some of these passages are characteristic of Macbeth almost throughout; and their influence contributes to form its atmosphere.  Images like those of the babe torn smiling from the breast and dashed to death; of pouring the sweet milk of concord into hell; of the earth shaking in fever; of the frame of things disjointed; of sorrows striking heaven on the face, so that it resounds and yells out like syllables of dolour; of the mind lying in restless ecstasy on a rack; of the mind full of scorpions; of the tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury;—­all keep the imagination moving on a ’wild and violent sea,’ while it is scarcely for a moment permitted to dwell on thoughts of peace and beauty.  In its language, as in its action, the drama is full of tumult and storm.  Whenever the Witches are present we see and hear a thunder-storm:  when they are absent we hear of ship-wrecking storms and direful thunders; of tempests that blow down trees and churches, castles, palaces and pyramids; of the frightful hurricane of the night when Duncan was murdered; of the blast on which pity rides like a new-born babe, or on which Heaven’s cherubim are horsed.  There is thus something magnificently appropriate in the cry ‘Blow, wind!  Come, wrack!’ with which Macbeth, turning from the sight of the moving wood of Birnam, bursts from his castle.  He was borne to his throne on a whirlwind, and the fate he goes to meet comes on the wings of storm.