... “I’ the name of truth,
Are ye fantastical, or that indeed
Which outwardly ye show?”
Banquo’s questions are those of natural curiosity,—such as a girl would
put after hearing a gipsy tell her schoolfellow’s fortune;—all perfectly
general, or rather, planless. But Macbeth, lost in thought, raises himself
to speech only by the Witches being about to depart:—
“Stay, you imperfect speakers, tell me more:”—
and all that follows is reasoning on a problem already discussed in his
mind,—on a hope which he welcomes, and the doubts concerning the
attainment of which he wishes to have cleared up. Compare his
eagerness,—the keen eye with which he has pursued the Witches’ evanishing—
“Speak, I charge you!”
with the easily satisfied mind of the self-uninterested Banquo:—
“The air hath bubbles, as the water has,
And these are of them:—Whither are they vanish’d?”
and then Macbeth’s earnest reply,—
“Into the air; and what seem’d corporal, melted
As breath into the wind.—_Would they had stay’d!_”
Is it too minute to notice the appropriateness of the simile “as breath,”
&c., in a cold climate?