And ran dismay’d away.
“Lorenzo. In such a night
Stood Dido with a willow in her hand
Upon the wild sea-banks, and waft her love
To come again to Carthage.”
A recent critic has spoken of the Poet-Laureate’s “wonderful skill in creating a perfectly real and living scene—such as always might, and perhaps somewhere does, exist in external nature—for the theatre of the feeling he is about to embody, and yet a scene every feature of which helps to make the emotion more real and vivid.” Careful students of Shakespeare know how truly these words apply to almost every one of his plays. He leaves not only the impression of each character deeply graven on your memory; but the season and the scenery which encompassed them, though perhaps not above a line or two are given to them, rise before us almost as indelibly. To take one sample out of many. In “Macbeth,” for instance, how does the scenery at every turn answer to the action and the emotion! For the first appearance of the witches there is the blasted heath, the thunder and lightning; then, as the key-note to Lady Macbeth’s fell purpose, there is—
“The raven himself is hoarse
That croaks the fatal entrance of Duncan
Under my battlements.”
But when King Duncan himself, with his retinue, appears, the whole aspect of things is changed, and the gracious disposition of the old king comes out very naturally in the view he takes of the castle in which he was so soon to meet his doom:—