Conduct me to mine host; we love him highly,
And shall continue our graces towards him.
By your leave, hostess.
When I read the sleep-walking scene of Lady Macbeth, I think that the most perfect piece of writing ever seen in profane literature. When I fall upon the above, it appears to me that is the most delicate and exquisite in the whole range of our author’s works. Is it possible that the same tremendous hand which painted the royal tigress, at length cowed by the aspect of another world, has drawn, with a pencil of air, this lovely and inexpressibly soft scene, where the perfume of a balmy atmosphere is fresh and soothing on your forehead, and in your nostril, and where the eye as well as the smell and ear (for I can hear the breeze murmur among the green branches, and the screams of joy uttered by those temple-haunting birds as they chase each other down the air,) is filled with delight. What a warm and living picture it is, with the fewest possible words! An old castle pleasantly situated—its massive turrets look down over a peaceful, rural scene, the pure-scented air recommending itself sweetly and nimbly to our gentle senses! Who that has spent six or eight hours of the early morning at a sedentary occupation, in a room, till the senses were wearied and the limbs ached with sitting—and the lungs played languishingly and the blood moved sluggishly—and the pulse beat feebly with exhaustion—who has not, on going forth, felt this soothing sensation, as some pleasant landscape spread its tranquil and soft-colored beauties before his eye, some picturesque building broke the sameness of the picture by its bold outlines in the foreground, the ever happy birds darting about the house eaves—and the life-breathing, cool, odorous air filling his veins with sweet impulses, stirring all that is agreeable in his heart, cooling the fever of the heated brain, and sending off, with its benign blessing, a world of sad feelings or melancholy forebodings.
In three lines we have this effect; and further, who expresses this pleasing, living thought—Duncan! the doomed victim of the assassin’s dagger. Yes, he feels the sweetness of nature, and he feels it for the last time. Look around thee, old man; those swells of verdant ground, those murmuring and soft waving trees, those shadows thickening and blackening as the eye pierces into the wood, this blue and bending sky with a few sleeping, fleecy clouds, thou shalt never see them more. Nature, always so tender and exquisite, has new and unutterable charms when we are never to behold it again.
Then Banquo acknowledges the softening influence of the scene.
Banquo. This guest of summer,
The temple-haunting martlet, does approve,
By his loved mansionry, that the heaven’s breath
Smells wooingly here: no jutty frieze,