fever of the heated brain, and sending off, with its benign blessing, a world of sad feelings or melancholy forebodings. In three lines we have this effect; and further, who expresses this pleasing, living thought—_Duncan!_ the doomed victim of the assassin’s dagger. Yes, he feels the sweetness of nature, and he feels it for _the last time_. Look around thee, old man; those swells of verdant ground, those murmuring and soft waving trees, those shadows thickening and blackening as the eye pierces into the wood, this blue and bending sky with a few sleeping, fleecy clouds, thou shalt never see them more. Nature, always so tender and exquisite, has new and unutterable charms when we are never to behold it again. Then _Banquo_ acknowledges the softening influence of the scene. _Banquo._ This guest of summer, The temple-haunting martlet, does approve, By his loved mansionry, that the heaven’s breath Smells wooingly here: no jutty frieze, Buttress, nor coigne of vantage, but this bird Hath made his pendent bed and procreant cradle: Where they most breed and haunt, I have observ’d, The air is delicate. Here is a picture which the reader sees as if by mere accident, and the imagination follows out each hint and goes from one salient point to another till the life-like scene rises before it. The luxuriancy and blandness of summer, the beautiful martlets filling the air as we have watched them with boyish delight a thousand times, with their noisy joy. They never appear so pretty as when coming in and out of their nests under the eaves of a house or barn, and still more in the buttresses and angles of an old castle. “Their loved mansionry” gives an additional impression of the beauty their “pendent beds and procreant cradles” add to the rough old castle which itself is brought finely out from the canvass by the light reflecting from each jutty frieze, buttress and coigne of vantage. Banquo continues the remark with a thought expressive of an observing, nature-loving mind returning, with new pleasure, to the repose of peace and the thoughts and the occupations which there have room to unfold themselves, after the bloody tumult of brutal war. I do not know, but I suppose it must be a truth in natural history, that the birds spoken of generally build their nests where the air is purest. See, also, the superior charm which the little observation possesses, from the lips of this noble soldier, dropped in a peaceful, sunshiny moment, skilfully thrown in after the furious storms of war, and before the yet more frightful tempest of guilt which is speedily to fall like a thunderbolt upon this group of human beings, apparently so far removed from danger, and about to commence a new era of contentment.