MacBeth's Hallucination

My favorite Shakespeare soliloquey, from MacBeth; a dark play about the careless corruption of one's conscience...

Macbeth’s Hallucination

Is this a dagger which I see before me,The handle toward my hand? Come, let me clutch thee.I have thee not, and yet I see thee still.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? I see thee yet, in form as palpableAs this which now I draw. Thou marshall'st me the way that I was going;And such an instrument I was to use.Mine eyes are made the fools o' the other senses,Or else worth all the rest; I see thee still,And on thy blade and dudgeon gouts of blood, Which was not so before. There's no such thing:It is the bloody business which informsThus to mine eyes. Now o'er the one halfworldNature seems dead, and wicked dreams abuseThe curtain'd sleep; witchcraft celebratesPale Hecate's offerings, 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 designMoves like a ghost. Thou sure and firm-set earth,Hear not my steps, which way they walk, for fearThy very stones prate of my whereabout,And take the present horror from the time,Which now suits with it. Whiles I threat, he lives: Words to the heat of deeds too cold breath gives.A bell ringsI go, and it is done; the bell invites me. Hear it not, Duncan; for it is a knell That summons thee to heaven or to hell.