“I am the spirit of joy and of mirth, And I gladden the hearts of the sons of earth, I twine a chaplet of deathless flowers For the fair young brows of the laughing Hours, I show to the Poet’s dreaming eye, The shadowy realms of Phantasy, A charm o’er the earth and the air I fling,— Such are the offerings I bring. Beings that people the depths of air, Come when I speak my wizard prayer; I tell my will, and away! away! O’er the boundless fields of glowing day, Where the quivering sunbeams ever play, Onward and onward they wing their flight, Brightening towards the source of light. Beings that people the depths of sea, Rise at my call and bow before me, And they bear me down to their coral caves, Where ever the roll of Sapphire waves Thro’ vaulted roof and temples dim, Sounds forth a strange and solemn hymn. But would’st thou know where I love to dwell, And where I weave my strongest spell,— Where beameth the light of woman’s eye, Where flowers spring up, there, there, am I!” S. MACBETH. “There is some soul of goodness in things evil.”—_King Henry V._ Macbeth is a historical character. He is one of those who stand on the page of history as personifications of vice, rather than as men who possess any thing in common with ourselves. They distinguished themselves by a career of crime—in general that crime arose from ambition,—their names have become a proverb, and are associated in our minds with a particular form of vice as the entire and bare sum of their character. Yet when thus viewed, what are called examples affect us little more than a lifeless homily. They raise in us no sympathy, and of course no interest. They may indeed excite a hatred of that abstract form of vice, but against that we feel secure, and we make no attempt to derive from them any further benefit. Our abhorrence forbids; for we look upon them not as human beings with their varying hues, but as monsters, almost as monsters born. This horror, thus excited at personified vice, seems to speak well for our hearts, yet it will be found to prevent us from taking discriminating views of such characters, and from deriving any practical wisdom from them. We do not reflect that they were men like ourselves, that though deeply sunk in vice, they were once as innocent as we may suppose ourselves to be; that it was by objects working upon what is within every one of us, that they became what they were; that the deeper they were involved in the coil of wickedness, the more narrowly does it become us, would we derive true