PHANTASY FROM MENTAL ASSOCIATION.

“This is the very coinage of your brain:This bodiless creation, ecstacyIs very cunning in.”Hamlet.

“This is the very coinage of your brain:

This bodiless creation, ecstacy

Is very cunning in.”

Hamlet.

Cast.How delightful to wander thus among the reliques of that age, when her citizens, the colonists of Britain, migrated from imperial Rome, and built their Venta Silurum, or Caerwent, from the ruins of which these now mouldering walls were formed. As we trod those pictured pavements of Caerwent beneath the blue sky of yesternoon, I felt all the inspiration of Astrophel, and a pageantry of Roman patricians seemed to sweep along the fragments of those painted tesselæ.

“Lulled in the countless chambers of the brain,Our thoughts are link’d by many a hidden chain;Awake but one, and lo! what myriads rise,Each stamps his image as the other flies.”

“Lulled in the countless chambers of the brain,

Our thoughts are link’d by many a hidden chain;

Awake but one, and lo! what myriads rise,

Each stamps his image as the other flies.”

There is a happy combination of antiquity and simplicity in this land of Gwent. Almost within the shadow of the Roman Caerleon, the Monmouthshire peasants, at Easter and Whitsuntide, assemble to plant fresh flowers on the graves of their relatives. How I love these old customs! the chanting of the carol at Christmas; its very homeliness so redolent of love and friendship: and that quaint old Moresco dance which was introduced to England by the noble Katherine of Arragon. Then the pastimes of Halloween andHogmanay in Scotland, and the Walpurgis night of Germany, and the May-day in Ireland, the festival of their patron saint, and the Midsummer night when the bealfires cast an universal lumination over the fells of the green isle, and the still more sacred fire, lighted up in November in worship of their social deity, Samhuin, whose potent influence charms the warm hearts of all the maids of Erin around the winter hearth of their homes. I listen unto these pleasures as if they were mine own: as children associate all the legends of their school histories with themselves and their own time.

In every spot of this land of Wales the very names of the olden time are before us: the romaunt of Prince Arthur and his knights is ever present to our fancy, for he hath, as on the crag that towers over Edinburgh, a seat on many a mountain rock in Wales; as the Cadair Arthur over Crickhowel, and the semicircle on Little Doward, and Maen Arthur on the moors of Cardigan.

Astr.I never look on scenes like this without the echo of that beautiful apostrophe of Johnson, among the ruins of Iona, whispering in my ear.

Inspired by such an influence, I have roamed over the Isle of Elephanta, and gazed on its gorgeous pagoda hewn from the rock, and adorned by gigantic statues and mysterious symbols of the same eternal granite: on the beauteous excavations of Salsette: on the wonders of Elora, and on the classic reliques of Persepolis: on the beautiful columns of Palmyra, the Tadmor in the wilderness, where Solomon built his “fenced city;” as well as those arabesque and gothic temples, the abbeys and cathedrals of our own island. I too have almost dared to think that superstition and idolatry might be forgiven for the splendours of its architecture, even for the elevation of those giant blocks of Stonehenge andAvebury, the mouldering altars of the druidical priesthood, in the city consecrated to their god.

So do I feel in this court-yard of Chepstow Castle, whilom the Est-brig-hoel of Doomsdaye Booke, and in later times so blended with English history. See you not the Conqueror and his knights in panoply on prancing steeds before you? See you not Fitz Osborne and Warren, its former lords, loom out upon your sight? And, lo! the portal opens, and the dungeon of Henry Martin, the regicide, yawns like a bottomless pit before us. The shade of Charles Stewart rises; and again the phantom of Cromwell, uttering his epithets of scorn, as if the wanton puritan were about to dash the ink in the face of his colleague as he signed the death-warrant of the king. And now the scene changes, and behold the doomed one is chained to those massive rings of iron, and there with groaning dies.

Ev.I am most willing that you should thus indulge in your wild rhapsody, Astrophel, for it is the happy illustration of one potent cause of spectral illusion—association. There are few whose minds are not excited in some degree when they tread the localities of interesting events. By memory and its combinations something like an inspired vision may often seem to come over us—a day-dream. Or, if we have been brooding over a subject or gazing on the relics of departed or absent love and friendship: or while we stand on a spot consecrated by genius, or when we havepassed the scene of a murder, still will association fling around us its visionary shadows.

Shortly after the death of Maupertuis, the president of the Academy of Berlin, Mr. Gleditsch, the curator of natural history, was traversing the hall in solitude, when he saw the phantom of the president standing in an angle of the room with his eyes intensely fixed on him: an effect perfectly explicable by the association of intense impression of memory in the very arena of the president’s former dignity.

You will remember the story of a rich libertine, told by Sir Walter Scott. Whenever he was alone in his drawing-room, he was so haunted by a spectralcorps de ballet, that the very furniture was, as it were, converted into phantoms. To release himself from this unwelcome intrusion he retired to his country house, and here, for a while, he obtained the quiet which he sought. But it chanced that the furniture of his town house was sent to him in the country, and on the instant that his eyes fell on his drawing-room chairs and tables, the illusion came afresh on his mind. By the influence of association the green figurantes came frisking and capering into his room, shouting in his unwilling ears, “Here we are! here we are!”

It is not, however, essential that there be substance at all to excite these spectres.Ideaalone is sufficient.

Do you think it strange that a ghost should appear fleshless and shadowy without some supernatural influence? Be assured that the only influence exists in the sublime and intricate workings of that mind which in its pure state was itself an emanation from the Deity; which is only shadowed by illusion while in its earthly union with the brain, and which, on the dissolution of that brain, will again live uncombined, a changeless and eternal spirit.

It is as easy to believe the power of mind in conjuring up a spectre as in entertaining a simple thought: it is not strange that this thought may appearembodied, especially if the external senses be shut: if we think of a distant friend, do we notseea form in our mind’s eye, and if this idea be intensely defined, does it not become a phantom?

“Phantasma est sentiendi actus, neque differt a sensione aliter quam fieri differt a factum esse.”

“A phantom is an act of thinking,” &c.

You have dipped deeply into Hobbes, Astrophel, and will correct me if I misquote this philosopher of Malmsbury.

It was in Paris, at the soirée of Mons. Bellart, and a few days after the death of Marshal Ney, the servant, ushering in the MareschalAîné, announced Mons. Le MareschalNey. We were startled; and may I confess to you, that theeidōlonof the Prince of Moskwa was for a moment as perfect to my sight as reality?

Now it is as easy to imagine a fairy infinitely small as a giant infinitely large. Between an idea and a phantom, then, there is only a difference in degree; their essence is the same as between the simple and transient thought of a child, and the intense and beautiful ideas of a Shakspere, a Milton, or a Dante.

“Consider your own conceptions,” said Imlac, “you will find substance without extension. An ideal form is no lessrealthan material, but yet it has no extension.”

You hear I adopt the wordidea, as referring to the organ ofvision, but sight is not the only sense subject to illusion. Hearing, taste, smell, touch, may be thus perverted, because the original impression was on the focus of all the senses,the brain.

Indeed, two of these illusions are oftensynchronous: as when a deep sepulchral voice is uttered by a thin filmy spectre, like the ghosts of Ossian, through which the moonbeams and the stars were seen to glimmer. But the illusion of the eyeisby far the most common, and hence our adopted terms refer chiefly to the sight: as spectre, phantom, phantasm, apparition,eidōlon, ghost, shadow, shade.

The ghost then is nothing more than anintense idea. And as I have caught the mood of story-telling, listen to some analogies of those deep impressions on the mind which are the spring of all this phantasy.

That destructive brainworm, Demonomania, is often excited in the mind of a proselyte by designing religious fanatics. Let the life of the selected person be ever so virtuous and exemplary, she (for it is usually on the softer sex that these impostures are practised) becomes convinced of the influence of the demon over her, and she is thus criminally taught the necessity of conversion—is won over to the erroneous doctrine of capricious and unqualified election.

These miseries do not always spring from self-interested impostors. The parent and the nurse, in addition to the nursery tales of fairies and of genii, too often inspire the minds of children with these diabolical phantoms. The effect is always detrimental,—too often permanently destructive. I will quote one case from the fourth volume of the Psychological Magazine, related by a student of the university of Jena.—“A young girl, about nine or ten years old, had spent her birth-day with several companions of her own age, in all the gaiety of youthful amusement. Her parents were of a rigorous devout sect, and had filled the child’s head with a number of strange and horrid notions about the devil, hell, and eternal damnation. In the evening, as she was retiring to rest, the devil appeared to her, and threatened to devour her. She gave a loud shriek, fled to the apartment where her parents were, and fell down apparently dead at their feet. A physician was called in, and she began to recover herself in a few hours. She then related what had happened, adding, that she was sure she was to be damned. This accident was immediately followed by a severe and tedious nervous complaint.”

The ghost will not appear to tell us whatwillhappen, but itmayrise, and with awful solemnity too, to tell us that whichhashappened. Such is the phantom of remorse,—the shadow of conscience,—which is indeed a natural penalty: a crime that carries with it its own consecutive punishment. Were the lattice of Momus fixed in the bosom, that window through which the springs of passion could be seen, there would be, I fear, a dark spot on almost every heart,—as there is, to quote the Italian proverb, “a skeleton in every house.” Of these pangs of memory, the pages both of history and fiction are teeming. Not in the visions of sleep alone, but in the glare of noonday, the apparition of a victim comes upon the guilty mind, —

“As when a gryphon through the wilderness,With winged course, o’er hill and moory dale,Pursues the Arimaspian, who, by stealth,Had from his wakeful custody purloinedThe guarded gold.”

“As when a gryphon through the wilderness,

With winged course, o’er hill and moory dale,

Pursues the Arimaspian, who, by stealth,

Had from his wakeful custody purloined

The guarded gold.”

Brutus, and Richard Plantagenet, and Clarence, and Macbeth, and Manfred, and Lorenzo, and Wallace, and Marmion, are but the archetypes of a very numerous family in real life,—for Shakspere, and Byron, and Schiller, and Scott, have painted in high relief these portraitsfromthe life.

Many a real Manfred has trembled as he called up the phantom of Astarte; many a modern Brutus has gazed at midnight on the evil spirit of his Cæsar; many a modern Macbeth points to the vacant chair of his Banquo, the ghost in his seat, and he mentally exclaims,—“Hence, horrible shadow! unreal mockery, hence!”

Ida.Aye, and many a false heart, like Marmion, hears, as his life ebbs on the battle-field, the phantom voice of Constance Beverly:

“The monk, with unavailing cares,Exhausted all the church’s prayers.Ever he said, that, close and near,A lady’s voice was in his ear,And that the priest he could not hear,For that she ever sung:‘In the lost battle, borne down by the flying,Where mingles war’s rattle with groans of the dying’ —So the notes rung.”

“The monk, with unavailing cares,

Exhausted all the church’s prayers.

Ever he said, that, close and near,

A lady’s voice was in his ear,

And that the priest he could not hear,

For that she ever sung:

‘In the lost battle, borne down by the flying,

Where mingles war’s rattle with groans of the dying’ —

So the notes rung.”

We read in Moreton an exquisite story of the trial of a murderer, who had with firmness pleaded—“not guilty.” On a sudden, casting his eyes on the witness-box, he exclaimed, “This is not fair; no one is allowed to be witness in his own case.” The box was empty, as you may suppose; but the eye of his conscience saw his bleeding victim glaring on him, and ready to swear to his murder. He felt that his fate was sealed, and pleaded guilty to the crime.

“——Deeds are done on earth,Which have their punishment ere the earth closesUpon the perpetrators. Be it the workingOf the remorse-stained fancy, or the visionDistinct and real of unearthly being:All ages witness that, beside the couchOf the fell homicide, oft stalks the ghostOf him he slew, or shows his shadowy wound.”

“——Deeds are done on earth,

Which have their punishment ere the earth closes

Upon the perpetrators. Be it the working

Of the remorse-stained fancy, or the vision

Distinct and real of unearthly being:

All ages witness that, beside the couch

Of the fell homicide, oft stalks the ghost

Of him he slew, or shows his shadowy wound.”

It is this utter humiliation of the spirit, and the conviction of our polluted nature, that rankle so intensely in the wounded heart; and thence the repentant sinner feels so deeply that awful truth, that there is a Being infinitely more pure and godlike than himself.

Ev.A very fertile source of spectral illusion is the devotion to peculiar studies and deep reflection on interesting subjects. Mons. Esquirol records the hallucination of a lady, who had been reading a terrific account of the execution of a criminal. Ever after, in all her waking hours, and in every place, she saw above her left eye the phantom of a bloody head, wrapped in black crape,—a thing so horrible to her, that she repeatedly attempted the commission of suicide. And of another lady, who had dipped so deeply into a history of witches, that she became convinced of her having, like Tam O’Shanter’s lady of the “cutty sark,” been initiated into their mysteries, and officiated at their “sabbath” ceremonies.

Monsieur Andral, in his youth, saw in La Pitié the putrid body of a child covered withlarvæ, and during the next morning, the spectre of this corpse lying on his table was as perfect as reality.

We have known mathematicians whose ghosts even appeared in the shape of coloured circles and squares, and Justus Martyr was haunted by the phantoms of flowers. Nay, our own Sir Joshua, after he had been painting portraits, sometimes believed the trees, and flowers, and posts to be men and women.

I knew myself a bombardier, whose brain had been wounded in a battle. To this man a post was an enemy, and he would, when a sudden frenzy came on him, attack it in the street with his cane, and not leave it until he believed that his foeman was beaten or lay prostrate at his feet.

Intense feeling, especially if combined with apprehension, often raises a phantom. The unhappy Sir R—— C——, on being summoned to attend the Princess Charlotte of Wales, saw her form robed in white distinctly glide along before him as he sat in his carriage: a parallel, nay, anexplanation, to the interesting stories of Astrophel.

Then the sting of conscience may warp acommonobject thus. Theodric, the Gothic king, unjustly condemned and put to death Boëthius and Symmachus. It chanced at that time, that a large fish was served to him at dinner, when his imagination directly changed the fish’s head into the ghastly face of Symmachus, upbraiding him with the murder of innocence; and such was the effect of the phantom, that in a few days he died. But these spectral forms were seen, like the dagger of Macbeth, and the hand-writing on the wall, by none but theconscience-stricken, a proof of their being ideal and not real.

Not long after the death of Byron, Sir Walter Scott was engaged in his study during the darkening twilight of an autumnal evening, in reading a sketch of his form and habits, his manners and opinions. On a sudden he saw as he laid down his book, and passed into his hall, theeidōlonof his departed friend before him. He remained for some time impressed by the intensity of the illusion, which had thus created a phantom out of skins, and scarfs, and plaids, hanging on a screen in the gothic hall of Abbotsford.

I learn from Doctor T. that a certain lady was on the eve of her marriage, but her lover was killed as he was on his way to join her. An acute fever immediately followed this impression; and on each subsequent day, when the same hour struck on the clock, she fell into a state of ecstacy, and believed that the phantom of her lover wafted her to the skies; then followed a swoon of two or three hours’ duration, and her diurnal recovery ensued.

Cast.I know not if it will make me happier, Evelyn, but I have learned from your lips to believe that many of those legends which I held as poetic fictions, may be the stories of minds, in which, under the influence of devoted affection, the slightest semblance to an object so beloved may work up the phantom of far distant or departed forms. You may have read the romantic devotion of Henry Howard to the fair Geraldine, the flower of England’s court, and the chivalrous challenge of her beauty to the knights of France. During his travels on the continent, he fell in with the alchymist Cornelius Agrippa, who by his sleight cunning showed in a magic mirror (as he said) to the doting mind of the earl, his absent beauty reclining on a couch, and reading by the light of a waxen taper the homage of his pen to her exquisite beauty. Then there was an archbishop of the Euchaites, a professor of magic in the ninth century. The Emperor Basil besought this pseudo-magus Santabaran, for a sight of his long lost and beloved son. He appeared before the emperor in a costume of splendour and mounted on a charger, and sinking into his arms, instantly vanished. This phantasy, and the glamourie of the witch of Falsehope over Michael Scott, and the vision of the wondrous tale of Vatheck, and the legend of the Duke of Anjou in Froissart, might be the rude shadows of some slight phantasmagoria working on a sensitive or impassioned mind; may they not?

Ev.I am proud of my proselyte, lady.

Ida.I presume these illusions may be wrought without the outlines ofdistinct shapes. I have ever thought the vision of Eliphaz the Temanite more solemn, because anundefinedshadow: “A vision is before our face, but we cannot discern the form thereof.” And where theprofanepoets have written thus mystically, they have risen in sublimity. Such is Milton’s portraiture of death:

“——the other shape,If shape it could be called, which shape had noneDistinguishable in member, joint, or limb;Or substance might be called that shadow seemed,For each seemed neither.”

“——the other shape,

If shape it could be called, which shape had none

Distinguishable in member, joint, or limb;

Or substance might be called that shadow seemed,

For each seemed neither.”

And in the splendid vision of Manfred, whose thoughts were, alas! so polluted by passion —

“I seeThe steady aspect of a clear large star,But nothing more.Spirit.We haveno formbeyond the elements,Of which we are the mind and principle.”

“I seeThe steady aspect of a clear large star,But nothing more.

“I see

The steady aspect of a clear large star,

But nothing more.

Spirit.We haveno formbeyond the elements,Of which we are the mind and principle.”

Spirit.We haveno formbeyond the elements,

Of which we are the mind and principle.”

And the idolaters profanely adopted this mystic metaphor when they inscribed their Temple of Isis, at Sais —

“I am whatever has been, is, and shall be, and no one hath taken off my veil.”

Ev.The phantom is often described as destitute of form. When Johnson was asked to define the ghost which appeared to old Cave, he answered: “Why, sir, something of ashadowybeing.” And there is a sublimity and a mystery in that which is indefinite. Two very deep philosophers have however differed in opinion regarding the effect of darkness and obscurity on the mind. Burke alludes to darkness as a cause of the sublime and terrific: (and he is supported by Tacitus—“Omne ignotum pro magnifico est:”) Locke, as not naturally a cause of terror, but as it is associated by nurses and old crones with ghosts and goblins.

I will not split this difference, but I believe Burke is in the right. Obscurity is doubtless deeply influential in raising phantoms; that which is indefinable becomes almost of necessity a ghost. If the ghosts of Shakspere did not appear, the illusion would be more impressive. In darkness and night, therefore, the ghosts burst their cerements, the spirits walk abroad, and the ghost seers revel in all their superstitious glory. The druids, those arch impostors, acted their mysteries in the depth of shadowy groves: and the heathen idols are half hidden both in the hut of the American Indian and the temples of Indostan. It is true children shut their eyes when frightened, but this isinstinctive, and because they think it real; but, in truth, they ever dread the notion of darkness. By the fancy of a timid mind, in the deepening gloom of twilight, a withered oak has been fashioned into a living monster; and I might occupy our evening in recounting the tales of terror to which a decayed trunk once gave birth, among some village gossips in the weald of Sussex.

There are few who “revisit the glimpses of the moon,” whose romantic humour leads them abroad about nightfall, who have not sometimes been influenced by feeling somewhat like phantasy, during the indistinct vision of twilight; the dim emanations of the crescent, or the more deceptive illusion of an artificial luminous point irradiating a circumambient vapour. Through the magnifying power of this floating medium, the image may be fashioned into all the fancied forms of poetical creation.

At the midnight hour, by a blue taper light, and in a ruined castle, a simple tale will become a romance of terror.

I have spoken thus, to introduce an incident which occurred years ago, and yet my mind’s eye shows it to me as if it were of yesterday.

It was in the year ——, on the eve of my presenting myself at the college for my diploma. I had been deeply engaged during the day, in tracing, with some fellow students, the distribution of thenervous ganglia. The shades of evening had closed over us as our studies were nearly completed, and one by one my companions gave me good night, until, about ten o’clock, I was left alone, still poring over the subject of my study, by the dim light of a solitary taper. On a sudden I was startled by the loud pealing of a clock, which, striking twelve, warned me most unexpectedly of the solemn hour of midnight; for I was not otherwise conscious of this lapse of time. For a moment I seemed in utter darkness, until straining my eyes, a blue and lurid glimmer floated around me. A chilliness crept over me, and I had a strange indefinable consciousness of utter desolation—of being immured in some Tartarean cavern, or pent among icy rocks, for the cold night-wind was sweeping in hollow murmurs through the vaults. In the blue half-twilight I was at length sensible that I was not alone, but in the presence of indistinct shadowy forms, silent and motionless as the grave; and by that awful sensation of the sublime which springs from obscurity, I conceived that I had suffered transmigration, or had glided unconsciously through the gates of Hades, and that these were the embodied spirits—the manes of the departed, in sleep; and then I thought the sounds were not those of the wind, but the hollow moaning of those restless spirits that couldnotsleep. By some species of glamourie which I could not comprehend, the gloom appeared to brighten by slow degrees, and the forms became more distinct. When we are involved in mystery, the sense of touch is instinctively brought to its analysis. I put forth my hand, and found that my eyes were not mocked with a mere vision; for it came in contact with something icy cold and death-like—it was an arm clammy and cadaverous that fell across my own; and as the smell of death came over me, a corpse rolled into my lap.

The moaning of the breeze increased, and the screech-owl shrieked as she flitted unseen around me. At this moment a scream of agony was heard in the distance, as of some mortal frame writhing in indescribable anguish, while a hoarse and wizard voice cried, “Endure! endure!” It ceased; and then I heard a pattering and flutter, and then a shrill squeaking, as of some tiny creatures that were playing their gambols in the darkness which again came around me. On a sudden all was hushed, and there was a glimmer of cold twilight, as when a horn of the moon, as Astrophel would say, comes out from an eclipse; and then a brighter gleam of bluer light burst through the gloom, at which I confess I started, and my hand dropped into a pool of blood. Like the astonished Tam O’Shanter, it seemed that I was alone in the chamber of death, or the solitary spectator of some demon incantation or of some wholesale murder. There were some forms blue and livid, some cadaverous, of “span-long, wee, unchristened bairns,” and others deluged in blood and impurity lay around me: one pale and attenuated form, that more than mocked the delicate beauty of the Medicean Venus, lay naked on the ground. On the athletic form of another the moonbeam fell in a glory, as if the fabled legend of Endymion was realized before my eyes.

Astr.And——

Ev.Ay, now for the secret—thematerielof this wild vision. The truth was, I had dropped asleep in the dissecting-room—the candle had burned out; and thus, with a copious supply of dead bodies, the howling of a tempest, the purple storm-clouds, the blue gleams of moonshine, and bats, and screech-owls, and the screams of patients in the surgical wards, and withal the hoarse voices of those croaking comforters, the night-nurses,—I have placed before you a harmony of horrors, that might not shame a legend of Lewis, or a Radcliffian romance.

Simple as this will be the explanation of many and many a tale of mystery, although fraught with accumulated horrors, like those of the “Castle of Udolpho;” and if, putting aside that ultraromantic appetite for the marvellous, we have courage to attempt their analysis, the pages of demonology will be shorn of half their terrors, the gulph of superstition will be illumined by the light of philosophy, and creation stand forth in all its harmonious and beautiful nature.

PHANTASY FROM CEREBRAL EXCITEMENT.

——“A false creation,Proceeding from the heat-oppressed brain.”Macbeth.

——“A false creation,

Proceeding from the heat-oppressed brain.”

Macbeth.

Astr.I will grant the influence of all these inspiring causes, Evelyn, but it is not under adventitious circumstancesalonethat the gifted seer is presented with his visions, but also in the clear daylight, in the desert, or in a mountain hut; surrounded, too, by those who are content with the common faculties of man.

Among many of the Gothic nations especially, women were the peculiar professors of divination and magic. The Volva-Seidkona, the Fiolkyngi, the Visindakona, and the Nornir, were the oracular priestesses, the chief of whom was the Hexa. These had the faculty of insight into skulda, or the future, and foreknew the doom of mortals: either to theniflheimr, or hell, over which presided the half blue and half flesh-tinted Hela, the goddess of death, who, as the Cimbric peasants believed, diffused pestilence and plague as she rode over the earth on her three-footed horse Hellhest; or to the Valhalla, or paradise of Odin. And this we read in the “Edda.”

Ev.Gramercy, Astrophel, you run up the catalogue of these weird women as you were involved in their unholy league. Have a care, or we must have you caged. There was once a Dr. Fordage, a divine of Berkshire, (as it is recorded in a strange book, “Demonium Meridianum, or Satan at Noon-day,”) accused of seeing spectres, such as “dragons with tails eight yards long, with four formidable tusks, and spouting fire from their nostrils.” Remember the peril, and beware.

Astr.Oh, sir, you must impeach by wholesale, for clairvoyance or second sight prevails in some regions as anationalfaculty.

The courses of my travel have shown to me this inspiration, especially among the elevated parts of the globe. The Hartz and other forests in Germany, the Alps and Pyrenees, the Highlands of Scotland, the hills of Ireland, the mountains of the Isle of Man, and the frozen fields of Iceland and Norway, abound in ghostly legends. Among the passes of the Spanish Sierras, also, it is believed that the Saludadores and the Covenanters saw angels on the hill-side during their wanderings and persecutions.

Ev.And how clear is thenaturalreason of this. As in the wide desert, so on the mountain, nature assumes her wildest form. Of the awful sublimity of clouds, and vapours, and lightnings, among the gorges of the giant rocks, of the Alps, and the Appenines, and the deep and dreadful howling of a storm in the icy bosom of a glacier, or bellowing among the crumbling walls of ruined castles, the lowlander can form no idea.

The mind both of the Bedouin Arab, and especially of the mountaineer, is thus cradled in romance. If that mind be rude and uncultivated, credulity and superstition are its inmates; ignorance being the common stamp of the seers, except in rare instances of deep reflectors or melancholy bookworms, whose abstractions, like those of Allan Bane and Brian and Mac Aulay, assume the prophetic faculty; the seer by its power perceiving, as he declares, things distant or future as if they were before his eye.

The superstitious legends of Martin, the historian of the Western Isles, and the precepts for the practice and governance of this clairvoyance, prove a deep interest and impression, but not a mystery. Among the defiles of Snæfel, in Man, the belief is prevalent: “A Manksman amid his lonely mountains reclines by some romantic stream, the murmurings of which lull him into a pleasing torpor; half-slumbering, he sees a variety of imaginary beings, which he believes to be real. Sometimes they resemble his traditionary idea of fairies, and sometimes they assume the appearance of his friends and neighbours. Presuming on these dreams, the Manks enthusiast predicts some future event.” Here is a local reason, as among the icy mountains of the north. Cheffer writes, that thus influenced, the melancholy of the Laplanders renders them ghost-seers, and the dream and the vision are ever believed by them to be prophetic.

Cast.It is the contemplation of these alpine glories, that gilds with so bright a splendour of imagery the romances of mountain poets,—the wild legends of Ossian, and those which spangle, as with sparkling jewels, the pages of the “Lay,” the “Lady of the Lake,” and “Marmion.” It may excite the jealousy of a classic, but the ghosts and heroes of Ossian, as very acute critics decide, are cast in a finer mould than the gods of Homer.

You smile at me, most learned clerks of Oxenford, yet I believe the critics are correct. When I was prowling in the king’s private library, in Paris, M. Barbier placed in my hands two of the most precious tomes, the folio “Evangelistarium,” or prayer-book of Charlemagne, and the 4to. edition of Ossian. The one is sanctified by its subject, and rich beyond compare in illuminations of gold and colours, and priceless in the eyes of the bibliomaniac. The other wasthe favourite book of Napoleon.

Fancy that you hear him in the solitude of St. Cloud, poring in deep admiration over passages like this:

“Fingal drew his sword, the blade of dark-brown Luno. The gleaming path of the steel winds through the gloomy ghost. The form fell shapeless into air, like a column of smoke as it rises from the half-extinguished furnace. The spirit of Loda shrieked, as, rolled into himself, he rose on the wind. Inistore shook at the sound. The waves heard it on the deep, and stopped in their course with fear.”

And yet these beauties, like the pictures of Turner, are looked upon with a smile of wondering pity or of scorn, simply because these home-keeping critics have never scaled the mountain, or breasted the storm for its wild and purple glory.

Among the mountains of Wales it was my fortune to light on many a wild spot, where the poetry of nature fell like the sun-light on the heart of the peasant. In the beautiful vale of Neath there is the tiny hamlet of Pont-Neath-Vechan. I shall ever remember how fair and beautiful it seemed as I descended from the mountain rocks of Pen y Craig, the loftiest of the Alps of Glamorgan, which inclose Ystrad-Vodwg, the “village of the green valley.” Around its humble cottages is spread the most romantic scenery of Brecknockshire. The tributaries of its rolling river there blend their waters—those torrent streams which Drayton has impersonated in the Polyolbion, as

“Her handmaids Meltè sweet, clear Hepstè, and Tragath.”

On the Meltè is the wondrous cavern of Porth-Mawr, through which, in Stygian darkness, flows this Acherontic river. And on the clear Hepstè is that glittering waterfall which in the midst of leafy woods and bosky glens, throws itself, like a miniature Niagara, from the rock, forming an arch of crystal, beneath which the traveller and the peasant cross the river’s bed on the moss-green and slippery limestone. Oh! for the pencil of a Salvator, the pen of Torquato, to picture the wild vision which was before my eyes when I sought shelter beneath this crystal canopy from the deluge of a thunder-cloud. The lightning flash gleamed through the waterfall, forming a prismatic rainbow of transcendent beauty, while the deep peal swept through the echoing dingles, and the crimson-spotted trout leaped in sportive summersaults over the water-ousel that was walking quietly on the gravel, deep in the water.

In this wilderness of nature, no wonder that legends should prevail: that fairies are seen sporting in the Hepstè cascades, and that in the dark cavern of Cwm-Rhyd y Rhesg, the ghosts of headless ladies so often affright the romantic girls of these wild valleys. No wonder that they believe the giant Idris, enthroned on his mountain chair, shook the three pebbles from his shoe into that pool which bears the name of the Lake of Three Grains; or that the shrieks of Prince Idwal are to this day heard by the peasants of Snowdonia, amid the storm which bursts over the purple crag of the Twll-dhu, and thunder-clouds cast a deeper and a darker shade over the black water of Lyn Idwal. Nay, I myself may confess, that as I have stood on the peaks of Y Wyddfa, while the white and crimson clouds rolled beneath me in fleecy masses, whirling around the cone of Snowdon, I have for a moment believed that I was something more than earthly. And when enveloped in the mysterious cloud which rests on the head of Mount Pilate in Lucern, I gave half my faith to the legend of the guide, that storm and human trouble, and the perils of flocks in the vicinity of its triple peak, were the result of the self-immersion of Pontius Pilate in its lake, an act of remorse at his impious adjudication. This unhallowed water was regarded with dismay, and not a pebble might be cast to make a ripple on its surface and disturb the quiet of the traitor. But, lo! in the sixteenth century the spell was proved to be a fable by an assemblage of bold Switzers, who hurled rocks into the lake, and swam across its water without the slightest indication of displeasure from this kelpie of the Brundeln Alp.

Ev.The truth is sweeter on your lips than fiction, Castaly. Whisper again in the ear of Astrophel the penalties entailed on theindulgenceof second sight. Dr. Abercrombie knew a gentleman whocould, by his will, call up spirits, and seers have assured me that the sight is to a certain degree voluntary:—by fixing the attention on a subject during the dark hour, the power of divination may be increased, but it cannot be controlled. But those who indulge in those illusions are often driven on to a degree of frenzy equal to the agonizing penalty of Frankenstein; even as the witch of Endor trembled when she raised before Saul the spirit of Samuel, or the Iberian princess Pyrene, who, like Sin, fled from the child-serpent which was born from her dalliance with Hercules.

The effort of the seers, nay, the mysterious ordeal to which they submit themselves, are often so painful, that they gaze with strained eyeballs, and fainting occurs as the vision appears. When the dark hour is o’er, they will exclaim with Mac Aulay, “Thank God, the mist hath passed from my spirit!” Indeed, Sir Walter Scott observed in those who presumed to this faculty, “shades of mental aberration which caused him to feel alarmed for those who assumed the sight.” Archibald, Duke of Argyle, was a seer, and it is written that he was haunted bybluephantoms, the origin, I believe, of our epithet for melancholy—“blue devils.”

At the foot of yonder purple mountains in Morgany, once lived Colonel Bowen, a doer of evil works, whose spectral visitations fill so many pages of Baxter’s “Essay on the Reality of Apparitions.” This deep historian of the realm of shadows tells that the wizard was worn down by the phantoms of his evil conscience; that he imprisoned himself and his boy, who was, I presume, a sort offamulus, in a small castle; that he walked and talked of diablerie, and I know not what miseries, in his sleep.

I have myself known those who see spectres when they shut their eyes, before an attack of delirium, which vanish on the re-admission of light; and in imaginative minds, under peculiar conditions, intense reading may so shut out the real world, that an effort is required to re-establish vision. In Polydori’s “Vampyre” it is recorded that they had been reading phantasmagoria, and ghost stories in Germany, thereby highly exciting the sensitive mind of Percy Bysshe Shelley. Anon, on Byron’s reading some lines of Christabel, Shelley ran from the room, and was found leaning on a mantel-piece bedewed with cold and clammy perspiration; and it is enough to read of the gloom which marked the minds of those geister-sehers, the proselytes of Swedenborg (among whom he ranked the King of Prussia), to reclaim all the converts to his strange religion.

Astr.There is a bright side, Evelyn. In Germany, those children which are born on a Sunday are termed “Sontag’s kind,” and are believed to be endowed with the faculty of seeing spirits; these are gifted with a life ofhappiness.

Ev.And you believe it. Well, for a moment I grant its truth; but it is the reverse in Scotland; the vision is almost ever cheerless, and prophetic of woe. “Does the sight come gloomy o’er your spirit?” asks Mac Aulay. “As dark as the shadow of the moon when she is darkened in her course in heaven, and prophets foretell of future times.” And the anathema of Roderich Dhu’s prophet Brian is dark and gloomy as the legend of his mysterious birth, or its prototype, the impure fable of Atys, and the loves of Jupiter and Sangaris.

Cast.If I am the sylph to charm this moody gentleman from his reveries, I will warn him in the words of a canzonet, even of the 17th century:

“Yet, rash astrologer, refrain;Too dearly would be wonThe prescience of another’s pain,If purchased by thine own.”

“Yet, rash astrologer, refrain;

Too dearly would be won

The prescience of another’s pain,

If purchased by thine own.”

And I will tell him what Collins writes on the perils of the seer, in his “Ode on Highland Superstition,” —

“How they whose sight such dreary dreams engross,With their own vision oft astonished droop,When o’er the wat’ry strath or quaggy mossThey see the gliding ghosts embodied troop. —They know what spirit brews the stormful day,And, heartless, oft like moody madness stareTo see the phantom train their secret work prepare.”

“How they whose sight such dreary dreams engross,

With their own vision oft astonished droop,

When o’er the wat’ry strath or quaggy moss

They see the gliding ghosts embodied troop. —

They know what spirit brews the stormful day,

And, heartless, oft like moody madness stare

To see the phantom train their secret work prepare.”

He listens not to me. Nay, then, I will try the virtue of aspellthat has oft shed a ray of light over the dark hour of the ghost-seer. I will whisper music in thine ear, Astrophel. The fiend of Saul was chased away by the harp of David; the gloomy shadows of Allan Mac Aulay were brightened by the melody of Annot Lyle; and the illusion of Philip of Spain, that he was dead and in his grave, was dispelled by the exquisite lute of the Rose of the Alhambra.

Astr.My thanks, fair Castaly; yet wherefore should I claim your syren spells.Myvisions are delightful as the inspiration of the improvisatore, and carry not the penalty of the monomaniac. But say, if therebe(in vulgar words) a crack in this cranium of mine, may not this crack, as saith the learned Samuel Parr, “let in the light?”

If prophetic visions in theearly agescame over the dying, why not in ours?

The last solemn speech of Jacob was an inspired prophecy of the miraculous advent:—“The sceptre shall not depart from Judah, nor a lawgiver from between his feet, until Shiloh come, and to him shall the gathering of the people be.” And is it profanation to ask, why may not the departing spirit of holiness, even now, prophecy tous?

As we see the stars from the deep well, so may such spirits look into futurity from the dark abyss of dissolution. In some cases of little children, I have learned that this unearthly feeling has caused them to anticipate their dying. How pathetically does John Evelyn, in his Diary, allude to the anticipation of his little boy,—“an angel in body and in mind, who died of a quartan ague, in his fifth year. The day before he died, he called to me and told me that, for all I loved him so dearly, I should give my house, lands, and all my fine things, to his brother.”

The dying seem indeed themselves to feel that they are scarcely of this world. Holcroft, a short time before his death, hearing his children on the stairs, said to his wife, “Are thoseyourchildren, Louisa?”—as if he were already in another existence. As if the human mind itself were perusing the celestial volume of the recording angel,—the awful book of fate.

When the Northern Indian is stretched on the torture, even amidst his agonies, an inspired combination of belief and hope presents him with vivid pictures of the blessed regions of the Kitchi Manitou. The faithful Mussulman, in the agonies of death, feels assured that his enchanted sight is blessed by the beautiful houris in Mahomet’s paradise. The Runic warriors also, as the Icelandic chronicles record in their epitaphs, when mortally wounded in battle, “fall, laugh, and expire;” and in this expiration, like the dying warriors of Homer, predict the fate of their enemies.

As the venom of the serpent curdled the blood in the veins of Regner Lodbrog, the Danish king, he exclaimed with ecstasy,—“What new joys arise within me! I am dying! I hear Odin’s voice; the gates of his palace are already opened, and half-naked maidens advance to meet me. A blue scarf heightens the dazzling whiteness of their bosoms; they approach and present me with the soul-exhilarating beverage in the bloody skulls of my enemies.”

Ev.In that awful moment, when the spirit is

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