of the moment.  But the limitations of her mind appear most in the point where she is most strongly contrasted with Macbeth,—­in her comparative dulness of imagination.  I say ‘comparative,’ for she sometimes uses highly poetic language, as indeed does everyone in Shakespeare who has any greatness of soul.  Nor is she perhaps less imaginative than the majority of his heroines.  But as compared with her husband she has little imagination.  It is not simply that she suppresses what she has.  To her, things remain at the most terrible moment precisely what they were at the calmest, plain facts which stand in a given relation to a certain deed, not visions which tremble and flicker in the light of other worlds.  The probability that the old king will sleep soundly after his long journey to Inverness is to her simply a fortunate circumstance; but one can fancy the shoot of horror across Macbeth’s face as she mentions it.  She uses familiar and prosaic illustrations, like

Letting ‘I dare not’ wait upon ‘I would,’
Like the poor cat i’ the adage,

(the cat who wanted fish but did not like to wet her feet); or,

We fail? 
But screw your courage to the sticking-place,
And we’ll not fail;[228]

or,

                      Was the hope drunk

Wherein you dress’d yourself? hath it slept since? 
And wakes it now, to look so green and pale
At what it did so freely?

The Witches are practically nothing to her.  She feels no sympathy in Nature with her guilty purpose, and would never bid the earth not hear her steps, which way they walk.  The noises before the murder, and during it, are heard by her as simple facts, and are referred to their true sources.  The knocking has no mystery for her:  it comes from ’the south entry.’  She calculates on the drunkenness of the grooms, compares the different effects of wine on herself and on them, and listens to their snoring.  To her the blood upon her husband’s hands suggests only the taunt,

My hands are of your colour, but I shame
To wear a heart so white;

and the blood to her is merely ’this filthy witness,’—­words impossible to her husband, to whom it suggested something quite other than sensuous disgust or practical danger.  The literalism of her mind appears fully in two contemptuous speeches where she dismisses his imaginings; in the murder scene: 

                           Infirm of purpose! 
     Give me the daggers!  The sleeping and the dead
     Are but as pictures:  ’tis the eye of childhood
     That fears a painted devil;

and in the banquet scene: 

                    O these flaws and starts,

Impostors to true fear, would well become
A woman’s story at a winter’s fire,
Authorised by her grandam.  Shame itself! 
Why do you make such faces?  When all’s done,
You look but on a stool.