Does the hope live in him for a moment that this home-visiting is not ill--that the Spirits are not ill? They have spoken truth so far--ergo, the Third "All hail!" shall be true, too. But more than that--they have spoken _truth_. Ergo, they are not spirits of Evil. That hope dies in the same instant, submerged in the stormy waves which the blast from hell arouses. The infernal revelation glares clear before him--a Crown held out by the hand of Murder. One or two struggles occur. Then the truth stands before him fixed and immutable--"Evil, be thou my good." He is dedicated: and passive to fate. I cannot comprehend this so feeble debate in the mind of a good man--I cannot comprehend any such debate at all in the mind of a previously settled and determined murderer; but I can comprehend and feel its awful significancy in the mind of a man already in a most perilous moral condition. SEWARD. The "start" shows that the spark has caught--it has fallen into a tun of gunpowder. TALBOYS. The touch of Ithuriel's spear. NORTH. May we not say, then, that perhaps the Witches have shown no more than this--the Fascination of Contact between Passion and Opportunity? SEWARD. To Philosophy reading the hieroglyphic; but to the People what? To them they are a reality. They seize the imagination with all power. They come like "blasts from hell"--like spirits of Plague, whose breath--whose very sight kills. "Within them Hell They bring, and round about them; nor from Hell One step, no more than from themselves, can fly." The contagion of their presence, in spite of what we have been saying, almost reconciles my understanding to what it would otherwise revolt from, the _suddenness_ with which the penetration of Macbeth into futurity lays fast hold upon Murder. BULLER. Pretty fast--though it gives a twist or two in his handling. SEWARD. Lady Macbeth herself corroborates your judgment and Shakspeare's on her husband's character. TALBOYS. Does she? SEWARD. She does. In that dreadful parley between them on the night of the Murder--she reminds him of a time when "_Nor time nor place Did then adhere, and yet you would make both_; They have made themselves, and that their fitness now Does unmake you." This--mark you, sir--must have been before the Play began! NORTH. I have often thought of the words--and Shakspeare himself has so adjusted the action of the Play as that, _since the encounter with the Weirds_, no opportunity had occurred to Macbeth for the "making of time and place." Therefore it must, as you say, have been _before it_. Buller, what say you now? BULLER. Gagged. NORTH.