In the Fourth Act--she is not seen at all. But in the Fifth, lo! and behold! and at once we know why she had been absent--we see and are turned to living stone by the revelation of the terrible truth. I am always inclined to conceive Lady Macbeth's night-walking as the summit, or topmost peak of all tragic conception and execution--in Prose, too, the crowning of Poetry! But it must be, because these are the _ipsissima verba_--yea, the escaping sighs and moans of the bared soul. There must be nothing, not even the thin and translucent veil of the verse, betwixt her soul showing itself, and yours beholding. Words which your "hearing latches" from the threefold abyss of Night, Sleep, and Conscience! What place for the enchantment of any music is here? Besides, she speaks in a whisper. The Siddons did--audible distinctly, throughout the stilled immense theatre. Here music is not--sound is not--only an anguished soul's faint breathings--gaspings. And observe that Lady Macbeth carries--a candle--besides washing her hands--and besides speaking prose--three departures from the severe and elect method, to bring out that supreme revelation. I have been told that the great Mrs Pritchard used to touch the palm with the tips of her fingers, for the washing, keeping candle in hand;--that the Siddons first set down her candle, that she might come forwards, and wash her hands in earnest, one over the other, as if she were at her wash-hand stand, with plenty of water in her basin--that when Sheridan got intelligence of her design so to do, he ran shrieking to her, and, with tears in his eyes, besought that she would not, at one stroke, overthrow Drury Lane--that she persisted, and turned the thousands of bosoms to marble. TALBOYS. Our dear, dear Master. NORTH. You will remember, my friends, her _four rhymed lines_--uttered to herself in Act Third. They are very remarkable-- "Nought's had, all's spent, Where our desire is got without content: 'Tis safer to be that which we destroy, Than, by destruction, dwell in doubtful joy." They are her only _waking_ acknowledgments of having _mis_taken life! So--they forebode the Sleep-Walking, and the Death--as an owl, or a raven, or vulture, or any fowl of obscene wing, might flit between the sun and a crowned but doomed head--the shadow but of a moment, yet ominous, for the augur, of an entire fatal catastrophe. SEWARD. They do. But to say the truth, I had either forgot them, or never discovered their significancy. O that William Shakspeare! TALBOYS. O that Christopher North! NORTH. Speak so, friends--'tis absurd, but I like it. TALBOYS. It is sincere. NORTH. At last they call him "black Macbeth," and "this dead Butcher." And with good reason. They also call her "his fiend-like Queen," which last expression I regard as highly offensive. BULLER. And they call her so not without strong reason. NORTH.