And every gesture of Shakspeare, even when he has violence to describe, is not violently made; but the most tremendous deeds are emphasized by having their bluster chidden and their outcry hushed; so the great midnight lifts a finger of silence, but shudders none the less, and sinks to awful depths with the crime which has fastened itself upon her secrecy, as if to drag her dumbly out of the sweet heaven down to a place of horror. While Macbeth goes to Duncan's chamber, and the wife listens to hear death follow, the verse turns over the business of shrieking to the owl: an elemental dread from the unsounded depth of human feeling puts an accent on the scene.
Since Shakspeare's time, our rhetoric has been slowly raising its pitch, just as the musical instruments had been doing it until a congress was called to reduce to a normal note of _C_, with two hundred and twelve vibrations in a second, the pitch that had become so exaggerated. Handel was content to write a minor third below even that. What a pity that a congress of the best minds could not impose a normal pitch upon the shrieking muse, the new Calliope, who goes by steam!
Observe the level, unobtrusive nature of Shakspeare's Sonnets and of the songs in the plays. The difference between them and our later scaling of the falsetto is like the difference between the moderately strung violins of Salo and Amati and the violin of the present day. Those antique violins were made to accompany soprano voices which had no ambition to reach high _C_, as all men's ears were then content with the medium register. "Their gently veiled, yet satisfactorily clear, silver tone, of virgin character," describes the songs of Shakspeare, and the sentiment for music which is scattered through the plays. In the middle notes almost every thing that is worth having in music is to be found. Behind those bars the melodies which can be domesticated under man's roof and by his hearthside are patiently waiting to be led forth and be installed. Shakspeare used to listen lovingly to the cheerful, healthy madrigal of Elizabeth's age, so wholesome in effect, so downright sincere in expression, so full of the robust, sensuous life of those brave English days, when human habits and emotions dwelt in the middle register of life, and there found Nature's own fulness and harmony, the finely blended color of passion and thought. But nowadays the daffodils that used to