Notes on Macbeth
 "His imagination is penal and retributive, as every reader at once perceives; but it is not a source of unmixed pain. There is an awe not unmixed with charm in the solemn and mysterious relation which the crimes of Macbeth establish between his own soul and the great material and moral forces in the cosmos, earth, the stars, night, heaven, and hell; and Macbeth was the man of all others to feel and value that awe. It is hard to believe that he could have pronounced the famous passage describing the descent of night, "ere the bat hath flown his cloister'd flight," etc., perhaps the finest lines of their kind in literature, without sharing in the profound and melancholy pleasure with which Shakespeare wrote, and every reader reads, these lines." O. W. Firkins. Read on...
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