Is smothered in surmise, and nothing is
But what is not.—iii, 139-142.
This is one of those passages which is sure to puzzle the ordinary school-boy, although a little help will enable him to understand it, and to see how natural under the circumstances is the state of mind which it paints. The murder is as yet only imagined (fantastical), and yet the thought of it so shakes Macbeth's individual (single) consciousness (state of man) that the ordinary functions of the mind are lost in confused surmises of what may come as the consequences of the deed; until to his excited fancy nothing seems real (is) but what the dreadful surmise paints, although that does not yet exist.
Your servants ever
Have theirs, themselves, and what is theirs, in compt
To make their audit to your highness' pleasure,
Still to return your own.—vi, 25-28.
His two chamberlains
Will I with wine and wassail so convince,
That memory, the warder of the brain,