And as Macbeth enters she endeavors to tranquilize his mind. She has his confidence no longer; he avoids her, and keeps alone after the murder of the king. She, not yet aware of the abysses of his nature, and little imagining that he has been plotting the murder of Banquo, supposes that the secret of his perturbations, of the solitude he now seeks, and of his avoidance of her, is the remorse that he begins to feel, and says as he enters:— “How now, my lord! why do you keep alone, Of sorriest fancies your companions making, Using those thoughts which should indeed have died With them they think on? Things without all remedy Should be without regard: what’s done is done.” His answer shows it is no remorse which is haunting him; his sorry fancies are new plots of murder: “We have scotch’d the snake, not kill’d it;” and we are still “in danger of her former tooth.” “But let The frame of things disjoint, both the worlds suffer, Ere we will eat our meal in _fear_, and sleep In the affliction of these terrible dreams That shake us nightly: better be with the dead, Whom we, to gain our place, have sent to peace, Than on the torture of the mind to lie In restless ecstasy. Duncan is in his grave; After life’s fitful fever, he sleeps well; Treason has done his worst: nor steel, nor poison, Malice domestic, foreign levy, nothing, Can touch him further!” Here is one of those cases where he uses his poetry as a cloak to his real thoughts. Yet despite his hypocrisy, which takes in his wife, his real meaning is clear. He would rather die than to go on in this fear: rather be like Duncan, whom they have at all events “sent to peace,” and whom nothing can “touch further,” than on “the torture of the mind to lie in restless ecstasy.” What is this “fear”? what is this “torture of the mind”? Is it, as Lady Macbeth supposes, from remorse? Oh, no! he tells us himself what it is; it is solely because Banquo and Fleance are alive:— “O, full of scorpions is my mind, dear wife! Thou know’st that Banquo, and his Fleance, lives.” This it is that tortures him, and this only. “But in them nature’s copy’s not eterne,” says she; meaning, as she has throughout this scene, solely to console him and draw his thoughts away. They may die; a thousand accidents may happen to them; you may outlive them; don’t torture yourself with vain fears. “_There’s_ comfort yet,” he cries, “they are assailable;” and now, after his old fashion, he breaks into poetry: “Then be thou _jocund_: ere the bat hath flown His cloister’d flight; ere, to black Hecate’s summons, The shard-borne beetle, with his drowsy hums, Hath rung night’s yawning peal, there shall be done A deed of dreadful note.”