"Thou canst not say, I did it! Never shake Thy gory locks at me!"
As the reader thrust the terror of these words upon us, all started
back, for the curtain was plucked suddenly away, and there before us,
not in Clarian's picture, it seemed, but in very truth, stood
Macbeth, conscious of the murdered presence. Even the reader,
absorbed as he was in his text, paused short, amazed; and I forgot
that I had seen this picture, only knew that it was a living scene of
terror. Doubtless much of this startling effect was the result of
association, the agitation of anxiety, the influence of the
impressive text, the suddenness of the apparition, the unusual light;
but in the figure of Macbeth, at which alone we gazed, there was a
life, a terrible significance, that outran all these causes. It was
not in the posture, grand as that was,--not in the sin-stamped brow,
rough with wrinkles like a storm-chafed sea,--not in the wiry hair,
gray and half rising in haggard locks, like adders that in vain try
to escape the foot that treads them down,--nor in the mouth, for that
was hid behind the impotent guard of the upraised arm and clenched
fist,--but in those painted eyes, into which, all-fascinated, we ever
gazed, reading in them all that crouching terror, all the punishment
of that spectral presence, all the poignant consciousness of his fate
to whom such things could happen, to whom already his victims rise
again,
"With twenty mortal murders on their crowns And push us from our
stools!"
While I yet gazed, a sickening terror pervading me in the presence of
these ghastly eyes, there came a voice, as if from afar,--"Read
on!"--so consonant with the tone of my emotions, that I looked to see
the figure itself take speech, until Mac, with a gasp, resumed.
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