WILLIAM G. STEVENSON. 69 
and dismayed by an apparition of a bloody dagger in 
the air. For a moment he questions the reliability of 
his sight, and exclaims : 
“Ts this a dagger which I see before me, 
The handle towards my hand?” 
He cannot believe the testimony of his eyes, and there- 
fore seeks confirmation in the sense of touch: 
“*. . « Come, let me clutch thee : 
I have thee not, and yet I see thee still.” 
Failing to grasp the dagger, he wonderingly asks: 
‘* Art thou not, fated vision, sensible 
To feeling as to sight?” 
And then, as if reason were struggling to gain supre- 
macy over the senses, he continues : 
““, . or art thou but 
A dagger of the mind, a false creation 
Proceeding from a heat-oppressed brain ?” 
How suggestive, how replete with truth was this pro- 
phetic utterance; and yet the intensity of his mind’s 
tension—because of the deed to be done and the instru- 
ment for its execution—still makes the terrible idea the 
dominating factor of his mind, and subordinates the 
senses to its rule! Heis not yet able to entirely dispel 
the hallucination, and he compares the apparition to the 
trusted blade at his side: 
**T see thee yet, in form as palpable 
As this which now I draw. . . . I see thee still, 
And on thy blade and dudgeon gouts of blood 
Which was not so before !” 
And then, as if the blood upon the dagger had, by its 
horrid suggestiveness, steadied his brain, reason once 
more resumes her seat and denies the apparition, by 
asserting— 
«c |, . There’s no such thing ; 
It is the bloody business which informs 
Thus to mine eyes.” 
