As cannons overcharg’d with double cracks; / So they / Doubly redoubled strokes upon the foe: / Except they meant to bathe in reeking wounds, / Or memorize another Golgotha, / I cannot tell—

This supernatural soliciting / Cannot be ill; cannot be good. If ill, / Why hath it given me earnest of success, / Commencing in a truth? I am Thane of Cawdor: / If good, why do I yield to that suggestion / Whose horrid image doth unfix my hair, / And make my seated heart knock at my ribs, / Against the use of nature?

O, never / Shall sun that morrow see!

This guest of summer, / The temple-haunting martlet, does approve, / By his loved mansionry, that the heaven's breath / Smells wooingly here: no jutty, frieze, / Buttress, nor coign of vantage, but this bird / hath made his pendant bed and procreant cradle.

Besides, this Duncan / Hath borne his faculties so meek, hath been / So clear in his great office, that his virtues / Will plead like angels, trumpet-tongued, against / The deep damnation of his taking-off;

Now o’er the one half-world / Nature seems dead, and wicked dreams abuse / The curtain’d sleep. Witchcraft celebrates / Pale Hecate’s off’rings; and wither’d murder, / Alarum’d by his sentinel, the wolf, / Whose howl’s his watch, thus with his stealthy pace, / With Tarquin’s ravishing strides, towards his design / Moves like a ghost.—

Art thou not, fatal vision, sensible / To feeling as to sight? or art thou but / A dagger of the mind, a false creation, / Proceeding from the heat-oppressed brain?

The night has been unruly: where we lay, / Our chimneys were blown down and, as they say, / Lamentings heard i’ th’ air, strange screams of death, / And prophesying, with accents terrible, / Of dire combustion and confus’d events, / New hatch’d to the woeful time.

Ay, in the catalogue ye go for men; / As hounds, and greyhounds, mongrels, spaniels, curs, / Shoughs, water-rugs, and demi-wolves are clept / All by the name of dogs

We have scorch’d the snake, not kill’d it. / She’ll close, and be herself; whilst our poor malice / Remains in danger of her former tooth.