e
By his loved masonry, that the heaven's breath
Smells wooingly here; no jetty, frieze,
Buttress, nor coign 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.

Perhaps the familiar swallow has never been treated with more
discrimination; and at this point of the tale of horror it has the
effect of a ray of sunshine in a sky dark with storm clouds.

In Act II. Macbeth describes his own horror and Nature's:

Now o'er the one half world
Nature seems dead.... Thou sure and firm-set earth,
Hear not my steps, which way they walk, for fear
Thy very stones prate of my whereabouts.

Lady Macbeth says:

It was the owl that shriek'd, the fatal bellman
Which gives the stern'st good-night.

Lenox describes this night:

The night has been unruly: where we lay
Our chimneys were blown down; and, as they say,
Lamentings heard i' the air; strange screams of death
And prophesying, with accents terrible,
Of dire combustion and confus'd events,
New hatch'd to the woeful time: the obscure bird
Clamour'd the live-long night: some say, the earth
Was feverish and did shake.

and later on, an old man says:

Three score and ten I can remember well;
Within the volume of which time I have seen
Hours dreadful and things strange; but this sore night
Hath trifled former knowings.

Rosse answers him:

Ah, good father,
Thou see'st the heavens, as troubled with man's act,
Threaten his bloody stage; by the clock 'tis day,
And yet dark night strangles the travelling lamp.
Is't night's predominance or the day's shame
That darkness does the-face of earth entomb
When living light should kiss it?

The whole play is a thrilling expression of the sympathy for Nature
which attributes its own feelings to her--a human shudder in presence
of the wicked--a human horror of crime, most thrilling of all in
Macbeth's words:

Come, seeling night,
Scarf up the tender eye of pitiful day,
And with thy bloody and invisible hand
Cancel and tear to pieces that great bond
Which keeps me pale.

In _Hamlet_, too, Nature is shocked at man's mis-deeds:

... Such an act (the queen's)
That blurs the grace and blush of modesty
... Heaven's face doth glow,
Yea, this solidity and compound mass
With tristful visage, as against