“I have lived long enough; my way of life
Has fallen into the sere, the yellow leaf:”
“Canst thou not minister to a mind diseased,
Pluck from the memory a rooted sorrow?”
She should have died hereafter:
“There would have been a time for such a word.”
His voice lingered on the melodious melancholy of the words and every line of his face responded to their mournful and despairing significance.
When told that Birnam wood was moving, the sense of supernatural power turned against him. For a moment he stood, a solid dismay. Then he staggered as if his brain had received a blow from the words which smote to its reeling centre. So, when Macduff exposed to him the paltering of the fiends in a double sense, his boasted charm seemed visibly to melt from him, and he shrank back as though struck by a withering spell. His towering form contracted into itself, his knees shook, and his sword half dropped from his grasp. But the next instant, goaded by the taunts of his adversary, he rallied on his native heroism, braced himself for the struggle as if he resolved to rise superior to fate whether natural or demoniac, and fell at last like a ruined king, with all his blazing regalia on. The performance left on the mind of the appreciative beholder, stamped in terrible impress, the eternal moral of temptation and crime culminating in fatal success and followed by the inevitable swoop of retribution: