The gentlewoman relates more particularly what she has seen, though with a guarded care, which not every gentlewoman in real life, under such exciting circumstances, would have the prudence to observe; but Shakspeare’s people are not only living but very sensible persons. To the question:
“When was it she last walked?”
she replies:
“Since his majesty went into the field.”
Here at once is another stroke. It tells the occupation of the king; called to a fearful contest and absorbed in it, the deadly secret is transpiring unopposed, undreamed of by him, behind his back, in the centre of his household, and from the lips of the very being who has so often taunted his weakness, and urged him with haughty scorn onward in his guilty and blood-tracked career. So little power has man over destiny! Thus is guilt beset. These are the nameless, unimaginable dangers it runs, when, bold and self-confident, it thinks itself equal to a contest with the Deity, who, seated in the clouds, strikes it with its own arm, and baffles its plans with the toils it has woven for others.
“Since his majesty went into the field, I have seen her rise from her bed, throw her night-gown upon her, unlock her closet, take forth paper, fold it, write upon it, read it, afterwards seal it, and again return to bed; yet all this while in a most fast sleep.”
There is nothing more appalling to me than a person walking in his sleep. It is such an image of death aroused from the grave—such a type of the spiritual world—such a contrast to the same being when awake, that I could never look upon my most intimate friend in such a state without a thrill of fear, as if I were gazing upon his spectre—without perfectly comprehending Hamlet’s account of his own feelings in looking upon a ghost.
——“and we fools of nature
So horribly to shake our disposition
With thoughts beyond the reaches of our souls.”