When a man's brain is well charged with blood, his powers are unified; but Macbeth's current was addicted to the lobes of figment to some defrauding of the rest. His wife's brain blushed all at once, and expanded to give the measure of her structure; so that her hope, implicating the whole of her, had all the substantiality of a deed. She was already the deed from which Macbeth's ambition swerved. He spawned spectres: she gave birth to men-children only. A woman inspired through and through with love for him, discontented with the slowness of his fortune, longing to touch the top and finish of her own; a helpmeet, whose unextinguished bridal ardor kept burning up all scruples as fast as her lover could rake them together. He, the still perfect object of her pride and passion, must become great: he must be lifted to a place whence all his qualities shall shine beyond cramped horizons with their petty crowds. She would kiss him into the compass of a throne, if lips could waft her soldier so far. Her whole soul, imagining him in statelier guises, grows so impatient to speak out its action, that love itself becomes for a moment inarticulate, though it is all the time the life-blood of her hope; as when he returns to her after the perils of the campaign which overthrew rebellion, her embrace is grave, as if her arms enclosed the coming state: they do not radiate the touch of love. He is not her darling husband, but "Great Glamis! worthy Cawdor! Greater than both by the all-hail hereafter!" His letters transported her not only beyond the "ignorant present," but beyond him, away beyond the familiar circle of his arms, to which she had so often committed soul and body,--away so far that she does not feel him. "The future in the instant" is embracing her; and it is against that splendor that her heart-beats break. The first exclamation which follows the reading of his letter betrays this passionate attachment: "_and shalt be_ what thou art promis'd." There runs through the tone a vibration from her own desire, no doubt; but it is dominated by exulting love, and bursts into a chord. The time has come: he shall, he must be, what he has always longed to be. The weird sisters are in luck when they promised so fairly to a man who is so profoundly loved. 'Tis the good will of Nature that I love him. Yet she knows him thoroughly. So close is her appraisement of him that she instinctively postpones love to the immediate exigency,--that is, to pour her spirits in his ear, to beat down every thing that might intercept him when putting forth that one decisive hand-grasp toward the crown. She fears his nature, because scruples hamper his unscrupulous ambition. They are not entirely, as she conceives them, the results of inborn mildness. He has a politic disposition which grows all the more considerate as he sees the widening of his popularity. He will proceed no farther against Duncan, because