Soliciting, sir, is, in my interpreting, "an appealing, intimate visitation."
NORTH.
Right. The appeal is general—as that challenge of a trumpet—Fairy Queen, book III., canto xii., stanza 1—
"Signe of nigh battail or got victorye"—
which, all indeterminate, is notwithstanding a challenge—operates, and is felt as such.
TALBOYS.
So a thundering knock at your door—which may be a friend or an enemy. It comes as a summoning. It is more than internal urging and inciting of me by my own thoughts—for mark, sir, the rigour of the word "supernatural," which throws the soliciting off his own soul upon the Weirds. The word is really undetermined to pleasure or pain—the essential thought being that there is a searching or penetrating provocative—a stirring up of that which lay dead and still. Next is the debate whether this intrusive, and pungent, and stimulant assault of a presence and an oracle be good or ill?
NORTH.
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.