Shall I taste fruit of the most blessed hope
I had in thee. Let me forget the thought
Of thy most pretty infancy: when first
Returning from the wars, I took delight
To rock thee in my target; when my girl
Would kiss her father in his burganet
Of glittering steel hung 'bout his armèd neck;
And, viewing the bright metal, smile to see
Another fair Virginia smile on thee;
When I first taught thee how to go, to speak;
And when my wounds have smarted, I have
With an unskillful, yet a willing voice,
To bring my girl asleep. O my Virginia,
When we began to be, began our woes,
Increasing still, as dying life still grows!
image of a dagger in the air, and thus soliloquizes:]
Macbeth, before the murder of Duncan, meditating alone, sees the The doors are open; and the surfeited grooms Do mark their charge with snores: I have drugged their possets,
Is this a dagger which I see before me,
The handle toward my hand? Come, let me That death and nature do contend about them,
I have thee not, and yet I see thee still.
Art thou not, fatal vision, sensible
To feeling as to sight? or art thou but
A dagger of the mind, a false creation,
Proceeding from the heat-oppressèd brain ?
I see thee yet, in form as palpable
As this which now I draw.
Thou marshal'st me the way that I was going;
And such an instrument I was to use.
Mine eyes are made the fools o' the other senses,
Or else worth all the rest I see thee still;
And on thy blade, and dudgeon gouts of blood,
Which was not so before. There's no such
thing:
It is the bloody business, which informs
Thus to mine eyes. Now o'er the one half
Nature seems dead, and wicked dreams abuse
The curtained sleep; witchcraft celebrates
LADY M. A foolish thought, to say a sorry How is 't with me, when every noise appalls me ? sight. What hands are here! Ha! they pluck out mine eyes!
MACB. There's one did laugh in 's sleep, and one cried, "Murder!"
Will all great Neptune's ocean wash this blood That they did wake each other: I stood and Clean from my hand? No; this my hand will heard them : rather
But they did say their prayers, and addressed The multitudinous seas incarnadine,
As they had seen me with these hanginan's
hands,
Listening their fear.
When they did say,
LADY M.
Consider it not so deeply.
MACB. But wherefore could not I pronounce
"Amen"?
I could not say, "Amen,"
"God bless us.'
I had most need of blessing, and "Amen"
Stuck in my throat.
LADY M. These deeds must not be thought
After these ways; so, it will make us mad.
MACE. Methought I heard a voice cry, "Sleep
Macbeth does murder sleep," the innocent
sleep,
Sleep that knits up the raveled sleave of care,
The death of each day's life, sore labor's bath,
Balm of hurt minds, great nature's second course,
Chief nourisher in life's feast,
LADY M.
What do you mean?
MACB. Still it cried, "Sleep no more!" to
all the house :
one red.
Re-enter LADY MACBETH,
LADY M. My hands are of your color; but I
To wear a heart so white. (Knocking.) I hear
At the south entry: - retire we to our chamber:
A little water clears us of this deed:
How easy is it, then! Your constancy
Hath left you unattended. (Knocking.) Hark,
Get on your nightgown, lest occasion call us,
And show us to be watchers :- be not lost
So poorly in your thoughts.
MACB. To know my deed, 't were best not
know myself. (Knocking.)
Wake Duncan with thy knocking! I would thou
LUCIUS JUNIUS BRUTUS OVER THE BODY
OF LUCRETIA.
FROM "BRUTUS."
WOULD you know why I summoned you to-
gether?
Ask ye what brings me here? Behold this dagger, "Glamis hath murdered sleep; and therefore lotted with gore! Behold that frozen corse!
Shall sleep no more, more !"
See where the lost Lucretia sleeps in death!
Macbeth shall sleep no She was the mark and model of the time,
The mold in which each female face was formed,
LADY M. Who was it that thus cried? Why, The very shrine and sacristy of virtue !
You do unbend your noble strength, to think
So brainsickly of things. Go, get some water,
And wash this filthy witness from your hand.
Why did you bring these daggers from the place?
They must lie there: go carry them; and smear
The sleepy grooms with blood.
Fairer than ever was a form created
By youthful fancy when the blood strays wild,
And never-resting thought is all on fire!
The worthiest of the worthy! Not the nymph
Who met old Numa in his hallowed walks,
And whispered in his ear her strains divine,
Can I conceive beyond her ;- the young
I'll go no more! Of vestal virgins bent to her.
I am afraid to think what I have done;
Look on 't again, I dare not.
LADY M.
Infirm of purpose!
Give me the daggers: the sleeping, and the
dead,
Are but as pictures: 't is the eye of childhood
Her father sheltered her, that not a leaf
Was blighted, but, arrayed in purest grace,
She bloomed unsullied beauty. Such perfections
Might have called back the torpid breast of age
To long-forgotten rapture; such a mind
Might have abashed the boldest libertine
And turned desire to reverential love
And holiest affection! O my countrymen !
You all can witness when that she went forth
It was a holiday in Rome; old age
Forgot its crutch, labor its task,
And mothers, turning to their daughters, cried,
'There, there's Lucretia!" Now look ye where
she lies!
Ask yon deserted street, where Tullia drove
O'er her dead father's corse, 't will cry, Revenge!
Ask yonder senate-house, whose stones are purple
With human blood, and it will cry, Revenge!
Go to the tomb where lies his murdered wife,
And the poor queen, who loved him as her son,
Their unappeased ghosts will shriek, Revenge!
The temples of the gods, the all-viewing heavens,
The gods themselves, shall justify the cry,
And swell the general sound, Revenge! Revenge!
And we will be revenged, my countrymen !
Brutus shall lead you on; Brutus, a name
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It will be granted. We may all then live
To make these woes a tale for distant years.
O, what a thought! It gushes to my heart
Like the warm blood.
BEATR.
O, trample out that thought! Worse than despair,
Worse than the bitterness of death, is hope ;
It is the only ill which can find place
Upon the giddy, sharp, and narrow hour
Tottering beneath us. Plead with the swift frost
That it should spare the eldest flower of spring :
Plead with awakening earthquake, o'er whose
couch
Yet both will soon be cold.
Even now a city stands, fair, strong, and free;
Now stench and blackness yawns, like death.
O, plead
With famine, or wind-walking pestilence,
Blind lightning, or the deaf sea, not with man!
Cruel, cold, formal man! righteous in words,
In deeds a Cain. No, mother, we must die,
Since such is the reward of innocent lives,
Such the alleviation of worst wrongs.
And whilst our murderers live, and hard, cold
Smiling and slow, walk through a world of tears To death as to life's sleep, 't were just the grave
Which will, when you 're revenged, be dearer to Were some strange joy for us. Come, obscure
Than all the noblest titles earth can boast.
Brutus your king! No, fellow-citizens !
If mad ambition in this guilty frame
Had strung one kingly fiber, yea, but one,
By all the gods, this dagger which I hold
Should rip it out, though it intwined my heart.
Now take the body up. Bear it before us
To Tarquin's palace; there we 'll light our torches,
And in the blazing conflagration rear
A pile, for these chaste relics, that shall send
Her soul amongst the stars. On! Brutus leads
you!
My God! can it be possible I have
To die so suddenly? So young to go
Under the obscure, cold, rotting, wormy ground!
To be nailed down into a narrow place;
To see no more sweet sunshine; hear no more
"Mother," quoth Ambrose to his thrifty dame,
So oft our peasant's use his wife to name,
"Father" and "Master" to himself applied,
As life's grave duties matronize the bride,
Mother," quoth Ambrose, as he faced the north
With hard-set teeth, before he issued forth
To his day labor, from the cottage door,
"I'm thinking that, to-night, if not before,
There'll be wild work. Dost hear old Chewton *
roar?
It 's brewing up down westward; and look there,
One of those sea-gulls! ay, there goes a pair;
And such a sudden thaw! If rain comes on,
As threats, the waters will be out anon.
That path by the ford 's a nasty bit of way,
Best let the young ones bide from school to-day."
"Do, mother, do!" the quick-eared urchins More beautiful. The younger little one,
Two little lasses to the father's side
Close clinging, as they looked from him, to spy
The answering language of the mother's eye.
There was denial, and she shook her head:
... Nay, nay,
- no harm will come to them," she
said,
"The mistress lets them off these short dark days
An hour the earlier; and our Liz, she says,
May quite be trusted - and I know 't is true-
To take care of herself and Jenny too.
And so she ought,
With large blue eyes and silken ringlets fair,
By nut-brown Lizzy, with smooth parted hair,
Sable and glossy as the raven's wing,
And lustrous eyes as dark.
"Now, mind and bring
Jenny safe home," the mother said,
"don't
stay
To pull a bough or berry by the way:
And when you come to cross the ford, hold fast
Your little sister's hand, till you 're quite past,
That plank 's so crazy, and so slippery
- she 's seven come first of (If not o'erflowed) the stepping-stones will be.
Two years the oldest; and they give away
The Christmas bounty at the school to-day."
The mother's will was law (alas, for her
That hapless day, poor soul !)- she could not err,
Thought Ambrose; and his little fair-haired Jane
(Her namesake) to his heart he hugged again,
When each had had her turn; she clinging so
As if that day she could not let him go.
But Labor's sons must snatch a hasty bliss
In nature's tenderest mood. One last fond kiss,
"God bless my little maids!" the father said,
And cheerly went his way to win their bread.
Then might be seen, the playmate parent gone,
What looks demure the sister pair put on,
Not of the mother as afraid, or shy,
Or questioning the love that could deny ;
But simply, as their simple training taught,
In quiet, plain straightforwardness of thought
(Submissively resigned the hope of play)
Towards the serious business of the day.
To me there's something touching, I confess,
In the grave look of early thoughtfulness,
Seen often in some little childish face
But you 're good children - steady as old folk-
I'd trust ye anywhere." Then Lizzy's cloak,
A good gray duffle, lovingly she tied,
And amply little Jenny's lack supplied
With her own warmest shawl. "Be sure," said
"To wrap it round and knot it carefully
(Like this), when you come home, just leaving
free
One hand to hold by. Now, make haste away
Good will to school, and then good right to play."
Was there no sinking at the mother's heart
When, all equipt, they turned them to depart?
When down the lane, she watched them as they
went
Till out of sight, was no forefeeling sent
Of coming ill? In truth I cannot tell :
Such warnings have been sent, we know full well
And must believe - believing that they are
In mercy then to rouse, restrain, prepare.
And now I mind me, something of the kind
Did surely haunt that day the mother's mind,
Making it irksome to bide all alone
By her own quiet hearth. Though never known
For idle gossipry was Jenny Gray,
• A fresh-water spring rushing into the sea, called Chewton Yet so it was, that morn she could not stay
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