Shakes so my single state of man that function
Is smothered in surmise, and nothing is,
But what is not.”
In uttering these words he painted to eye and ear how temptation divides the soul into the desiring passion and the forbidding principle and sets them in deadly contention. Then the apologetic sympathy of his reply to the expostulation of Banquo,—
“Worthy Macbeth, we stay upon your leisure,”—
showed the gentle quality of his nature:
“Give me your favor: my dull brain was wrought
With things forgotten. Kind gentlemen, your pains
Are registered where every day I turn
The leaf to read them. Let us toward the king.”