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Ross:
Alas, poor country,
Almost afraid to know itself! It cannot
Be call’d our mother, but our grave, where nothing,
But who knows nothing, is once seen to smile;
Where sighs, and groans, and shrieks, that rent the air,
Are made, not mark’d; where violent sorrow seems
A modern ecstasy. The dead man’s knell
Is there scarce ask’d for who; and good men’s lives
Expire before the flowers in their caps,
Dying or ere they sicken.
Macduff:
O, relation
Too nice, and yet too true!
Malcolm:
What’s the newest grief?
Ross:
That of an hour’s age doth hiss the speaker;
Each minute teems a new one.
Macduff:
How does my wife?
Ross:
Why, well.
Macduff:
And all my children?
Ross:
Well too.
Macduff:
The tyrant has not batter’d at their peace?
Ross:
No; they were well at peace when I did leave ’em.
Macduff:
Be not a niggard of your speech: how goes’t?
Ross:
When I came hither to transport the tidings,
Which I have heavily borne, there ran a rumour
Of many worthy fellows that were out;
Which was to my belief witness’d the rather,
For that I saw the tyrant’s power afoot.
Now is the time of help. Your eye in Scotland
Would create soldiers, make our women fight,
To doff their dire distresses.
Malcolm:
Be't their comfort
We are coming thither. Gracious England hath
Lent us good Siward and ten thousand men;
An older and a better soldier none
That Christendom gives out.
Ross:
Would I could answer
This comfort with the like! But I have words
That would be howl’d out in the desert air,
Where hearing should not latch them.
Macduff:
What concern they?
The general cause? or is it a fee-grief
Due to some single breast?
Ross:
No mind that’s honest
But in it shares some woe, though the main part
Pertains to you alone.
Macduff:
If it be mine,
Keep it not from me, quickly let me have it.
Ross:
Let not your ears despise my tongue for ever,
Which shall possess them with the heaviest sound
That ever yet they heard.
Macduff:
Humh! I guess at it.
Ross:
Your castle is surpris’d; your wife and babes
Savagely slaughter’d. To relate the manner
Were, on the quarry of these murder’d deer,
To add the death of you.