Macb. To know my deed,-'twere best not know myself. [Knocking. Wake Duncan with thy knocking! I would thou couldst. SHAKSPEARE. II. 191. THE KNOCKING AT THE GATE, IN MACBETH. ROM my boyish days I had always felt a great perplexity on gate, which succeeds to the murder of Duncan, produced to my feelings an effect for which I never could account. The effect was, that it reflected back upon the murder a peculiar awfulness and a depth of solemnity; yět, however obstinately I endeavored with my understanding to comprehend this, for many years I never could see why it should produce such an effect. Here I pause for one moment, to exhort the reader never to pay any attention to his understanding when it stands in opposition to any other faculty of his mind. The mere understanding, however useful and indispensable, is the meanèst faculty in the human mind, and the most to be distrusted; and yet the great majority of people trust to nothing else; which may do for ordinary life, but not for philosophical purposes. 2. My understanding could furnish no reason why the knocking at the gate in Macbeth should produce any effect, direct or reflected. In fact, my understanding said positively that it could not produce any effect. But I knew better: I felt that it did; and I waited and clung to the problem until further knowledge should enable me to solve it. At length I solved it to my own satisfaction, and my solution is this: Murder in ordinary cases, where the sympathy is wholly directed to the case of the murdered person, is an incident of coarse and vulgar horror; and for this reason, that it flings the interèst exclusively upon the natural but ignoble instinct by which we cleave to life; an instinct which, as being indispensable to the primal law of selfpreservation, is the same in kind (though different in degree) among all living creatures: this instinct, therefore, because it annihilates all distinctions, and degrades the greatest of men to the level of "the poor beetle that we tread on," exhibits human nature in its most ab'ject and humiliating attitude. 3. Such an attitude would little suit the purposes of the poët. What, then, must he do? He must throw the interest on the murderer. Our sympathy must be with him (of course I mean a sympathy of comprehension, a sympathy by which we enter into his feelings and are made to understand them—not a sympathy of pity or approbation). In the murdered person all strife of thought, all flux and reflux of passion and of purpose, are crushed by one overwhelming panic: the fear of instant death smites him "with its petrific mace." But in the murderer —such a murderer as a poet will condescend to-there must be raging some great storm of passion-jealousy, ambition, vengeance, hatred-which will create a hell within him; and into this hell we are to look. 4. In Macbeth, for the sake of gratifying his own enormous and teeming faculty of creation, Shakspeare has introduced two murderers; and, as usual in his hands, they are remarkably discriminated: but, though in Macbeth the strife of mind is greater than in his wife-the tiger spirit not so awake, and his feelings caught chiefly by contagion from her, yet, as both were finally involved in the guilt of murder, the murderous mind of necessity is finally to be presumed in both. This was to be expressed; and on its own account, as well as to make it a more proportionable antagonist to the unoffending nature of their victim, "the gracious Duncan," and adequately to expound "the deep damnation of his taking off," this was to be expressed with peculiar energy. We were to be made to feel that the human nature, i. e., the divine nature of love and mercy, spread through the hearts of all creatures, and seldom utterly withdrawn from man, was gone, vanished, extinct; and that the fiendish nature had taken its place. And, as this effect is marvelously accomplished in the dialogues and soliloquies themselves, so it is finally consummated by the expedient under consideration; and it is to this that I now solicit the reader's attention. 5. If the reader has ever witnessed a wife, daughter, or sister in a fainting fit, he may chance to have observed that the most affecting moment in such a spectacle is that in which a sigh and a stirring announce the recommencement of suspended life. Or, if the reader has ever been present in a vast metropolis on the day when some great national idol was carried in funeral pomp to his grave, and chancing to walk near the course through which it passed, has felt powerfully, in the silence and desertion of the streets, and in the stagnation of ordinary business, the deep interest which at that moment was possessing the heart of man,-if all at once he should hear the deathlike stillness broken up by the sound of wheels rattling away from the scene, and making known that the transitory vision was dissolved, he will be aware that at no moment was his sense of the complete suspension and pause in ordinary human concerns so full and affecting, as at that moment when the suspension ceases and the goings-on of human life are suddenly resumed. 6. All action in any direction is best expounded, measured, and made apprehensible by reäction. Now apply this to the case in Macbeth. Here, as I have said, the retiring of the human heart and the entrance of the fiendish heart was to be expressed and made sensible. Another world has stepped in, and the murderers are taken out of the region of human things, human purposes, human desires. They are transfigured: Lady Macbeth is "unsexed;" Macbeth has forgot that he was born of woman: both are conformed to the image of devils; and the world of devils is suddenly revealed. But how shall this be conveyed and made palpable? 7. In order that a new world may step in, this world must for a time disappear. The murderers and the murder must be insulated-cut off by an immeasurable gulf from the ordinary tide and succession of human affairs-locked up and sequestered in some deep recess'; we must be made sensible that the world of ordinary life is suddenly arrested-laid asleep-tranced-racked into a dread armistice: time must be annihilated; relation to things without abolished; and all must pass self-withdrawn into a deep syncope' and suspension of earthly passion. Hence it is, that when the deed is done, when the work of darkness is perfect, then the world of darkness passes away like a pageantry in the clouds: the knocking at the gate is heard, and it makes known audibly that the reaction has commenced: the human has made its reflux upon the fiendish; the pulses of life are beginning to beat again, and the reëstablishment of the goingson of the world in which we live, first makes us profoundly sensible of the awful parenthesis that had suspended them. 'Syncope, (sing'ko pe), a fainting or swooning; a diminution, decrease, or interruption of the motion of the heart, and of respiration, accompanied with a suspension of the action of the brain, and a temporary loss of sensation, volition, and other faculties. 8. O mighty poet! Thy works are not as those of other men, simply and merely great works of art, but are also like the phenomena of nature-like the sun and the sea, the stars and the flowers, like frost and snow, rain and dew, hail-storm and thunder,-which are to be studied with entire submission of our own faculties, and in the perfect faith that in them there can be no too much or too little, nothing useless or inert; but that, the further we press in our discoveries, the more we shall see proofs of design and self-supporting arrangement where the careless eye had seen nothing but accident. DE QUINCEY. SECTION XXXIX. I. 192. MESSIAH. YE belong. E nymphs of Sŏlyma!' begin the song 4 2 The mossy fountains and the sylvan shades, 1 Sŏl'y ma, another name for Jerusalem. 2 Pín' dus, a lofty range of mountains in Northern Greece. Aonian maids, the Muscs, so called, because they frequented Mt. Helicon and the fountain Aganippe, which were in Aonia, one of the ancient names of Baotia. Isaiah, (lzà' yå). Peace o'er the world her olive wand extend, And white-robed Innocence from heaven descend. 4. Swift fly the years, and rise the expected morn! 5. Hark! a glad voice the lonely desert cheers: 6. The Saviour comes! by ancient bards foretold— 7. As the good shepherd tends his fleecy care, |