were spoken with an abstracted and concentrated air that fully revealed the awful scheme that loomed darkly far back in his mind. Left alone with himself, the temptation renewed the struggle between his better and his worse self. In the long and wonderful soliloquy, beginning—
“If it were done when ’tis done, then ’twere well,”—
he painted the gradual victory of reason, honor, conscience, and affection over the fell ambition that was spurring him to murder, and, as Lady Macbeth entered, he exclaimed, with a clearing and relieved look,—
“We will proceed no further in this business.”
But the stinging taunts with which she upbraided him, and the frightful energy of her own resolution with which she eloquently infected him, worked so strongly on his susceptible nature that he reinstalled his discarded purpose, and went out saying firmly,—
“I am settled, and bend up
Each corporal agent to this terrible feat.”
In this scene he so distinctly exhibited the operation of her influence on him, the slow change of his innocent determination into uncertain wavering, and then the change of the irresolute state into guilty determination, that the spectators could almost see the inspiring temptress pour her spirits into him, as with the valor of her tongue she chastised his hesitation away.
When he next appeared he looked oppressed, bowed, haggard, and pale, as if the fearful crisis had exerted on him the effect of years of misery. In half-undress, with semi-distraught air, his hushed and gliding manner of sinewy stealth, in conjunction with the silence and darkness of the hour, conveyed a mysterious impression of awe and terror to every soul. He said to the servant, with an absent look and tone, as if the words uttered themselves without his heed,—
“Go; bid thy mistress, when my drink is ready,