While there’s life there’s hope, and hope is, by the nature of it, intent on to-morrow. As with hopes, so with fears. And hopes and fears together make up the sum of what has interest in life. No wonder, then, if to-morrow is a frequent word with the poet-philosopher of human life; and that in comedy and in tragedy alike, it serves his turn. Be it a wedding for to-morrow or an execution for to-morrow, Shakspeare iterates and reiterates the phrase, with all the dramatic realism that informs and vivifies his creations. Is it the wedding of Hero with Claudio, for instance? “When are you married, madam?” asks Ursula of the bride; who, with affected levity, replies,— “Why, every day; to-morrow. Come, go in; I’ll show thee some attires; and have thy counsel, Which is the best to furnish me to-morrow.” Little she recks of what is to betide her ere to-morrow dawn. Or is it an execution? Hear Angelo’s decree against another (quite another) Claudio: “Were he my kinsman, brother, or my son, It would be thus with him;—he must die to-morrow. _Isab._ To-morrow! O, that’s sudden! Spare, him, spare him; He’s not prepared for death.” Many scenes later we have the Provost imparting his fate to the doomed man:— “Look, here’s the warrant, Claudio, for thy death: ’Tis now dead-midnight, and by eight to-morrow Thou must be made immortal.” Presently the disguised duke comes in, and asks of the Provost,— “Have you no countermand for Claudio yet, But he must die to-morrow? _Prov._ None, sir; none.” One may wonder whether Macbeth, brooding on the vague and vasty gloom of that word, bethought him of the fatal first use of it in his incipient designs against his sovran. The gracious Duncan, he tells his wife, on reaching home, is to become his guest to-night: “_Lady M._ And when goes hence? _Macb._ To-morrow,—as he purposes. _Lady M._ O, never Shall sun that morrow see!” Reason good, or rather, in a bad sense, reason of the worst, had Macbeth to brood in after-days, when the morrow that never came to Duncan, had come blood-stained to _him_,—on the far-reaching capacities of so memorable a phrase. But from Shakspeare turn to other sources of illustration. Truth as well as pathos has been justly ascribed to the following expansion of a very natural sentiment—“the fear of personal oblivion in one’s own home”—artistically rendered by one of a gifted family of artists: