Shed yet some small drops from thy tender spring,
Because kind nature doth require it so.”
The relentless spirit of Lady Macbeth is in nothing figured more acutely than when the woman and mother is made to say,—
“I have given suck, and know
How tender ’tis to love the babe that milks me.
I would, while it was smiling in my face,
Have plucked my nipple from his boneless gums
And dashed the brains out, had I sworn as you
Have done to this.”
In the witch’s hell-broth one ingredient is “finger of birth-strangled babe,” while in the portents which rise to Macbeth’s vision a bloody child and a child crowned, with a tree in his hand, are apparitions of ghostly prophecy. Then in that scene where Ross discloses slowly and with pent-up passion the murder of Macduff’s wife and children, and Macduff hears as in a dream, waking to the blinding light of horrid day, with what a piercing shriek he cries out,—