——“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 circumstances _alone_ that 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 the
niflheimr, 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 a _national_ faculty.
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 the _natural_ reason 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 was _the 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 the _indulgence_
of second sight. Dr. Abercrombie knew a gentleman who _could_, 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 by _blue_ phantoms, 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 of _famulus_, 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
of _happiness_.
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 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 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 a _spell_ that
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. _My_ visions are delightful as the inspiration of the
improvisatore, and carry not the penalty of the monomaniac. But say, if
there _be_ (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 the _early ages_ came 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 to _us_?
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 those _your_ children, 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.”