“She was a charmer, and cou’d almost read
The thoughts of people.”
OTHELLO.
IDA. As you unfold the wonders of the mind, Evelyn, the secrets of many
splendid mysteries shine forth in the light of your truth; and the
wisdom of “charmed rings,” “blessed brambles,” and amulets and
talismans, fades before the precepts of a purer faith. Yet is there no
witchcraft in your philosophy? You have, methinks, absolved Astrophel
from spells and dark hours, for, in the softened lustre of his eye I see
a light more holy than its wonted flash of divination.
CAST. You have more faith in his conversion than I have, Ida; for, lo ye
now! On a mossy stone in Tintern lay this sable velvet pouch, which,
from its mystic ’broidery, might be the lost treasure of a Rosicrucian
cabalist.
“There’s magic in the web of it;
A sibyl that had number’d in the world
The sun to make two hundred compasses,
In her prophetic fury sew’d the work.”
And here is a scroll of vellum folded within it. Listen, and you shall
hear the pencillings of some unhappy student, benighted in the mazes of
the Cabala.
“The eye of modern philosophy may wink at the wisdom of occult sciences,
and sorcerers and magicians, necromancers and Rosicrucians, cabalists
and conjurers, astrologers and soothsayers, Philomaths, Drows, and
Oreades, wizards and witches, and warlocks, and sibyls and gipsies, may
be, in _its_ estimation, a mere legion of cyphers. Yet faith hath been
long and firmly lavished on the art of divination by the learned and
mighty men of all ages. The Chaldean, who read the stars, was the
coryphæus and the type of superhuman knowledge; the magi of Persia and
Egypt, and other orient lands, followed in his wake. The venerable
Hermes Trismegistus was surrounded by his proselytes in the year of the
world 2076; and Apollonius and Zoroaster, and Pythagoras, and, in later
ages, John of Leyden, Roger Bacon, and other learned mystagogues, have
imbibed a more than mortal wisdom from the aspect of those starry lights
which gem the vaulted firmament; while the luminous schools of Padua,
and Seville, and Salamanca, were rich in the records of occult and
mystic learning. Emperors and kings, and ministers, who ruled the
destiny of mighty nations, have believed. Wallenstein was all confiding;
Richelieu and Mazarin (as Morin writes) retained soothsayers as a part
of their household; Napoleon studied with implicit faith his book of
fate; and Canute, obedient to his confidence in the virtue of relics,
directed his Roman agent to buy St. Augustine’s arms for one hundred
silver talents, and one of gold.
“Nay, what saith divinity itself? Glanvil, the chaplain of King Charles
II., affirms in his ‘Saducismus Triumphatus,’ that ‘the disbeliever in a
witch must believe the devil gratis;’ and Wesley said, that ‘giving up
witchcraft was, in fact, giving up the Bible.’ Now, as the Chaldean
sophs were divided into three classes—1. the ‘Ascaphim,’ or charmer; 2.
the ‘Mecascaphim,’ or magician; 3. the ‘Chasdim,’ or astrologer; so the
legion of modern witches was composed of a mystic tryad, distinguished
by colours that were a symbol of their influence on our mortal frame.
The black witch could hurt, but not help; the white could help, but not
hurt; the grey could both help and hurt.”
IDA. My own Castaly, have pity on us. Evelyn may unrol the coils of this
unholy manuscript if he will.
I do believe this lettered clerk has, in some unhappy hour, wandered by
the ruins of the Seven Churches in the valley of Glendalough; and there,
creeping up to St. Keven’s bed, that hangs over the gloomy waters of its
lake, has won the fatal gift of Catholic magic. Or perchance he has
sworn allegiance with Faust and Friar Bacon.
ASTR. If an Oxford student _must_ kneel at the shrine of a fair lady, he
will whisper this confession. In exploring the treasures of black-letter
romance, he revelled among the occult mysteries, slighting that pure
analysis of nature which is the essence of all philosophy. The legends
of Reginald Scott, De Foe, Glanvil, and Wanley, were the companions of
his pillow; and thus in poring over the legends of enchantment, he was
himself enchanted, and contemplated a wondrous history of witchcraft,
where Sir Walter himself had failed. Let me have light penance, and I
promise in the simple and beautiful light of nature alone to read her
wonders; and if I dare, to study astrology in those planet eyes which
look so mildly on their proselyte.
IDA. Or rather, as the magi of old, you will burn your books of
divination; and, like Friar Bacon, who broke the rare glass which showed
him things fifty miles off, you will study divinity, and become a pious
anchorite.
CAST. I am happy that you abandon the dark and dooming spells of the
magus and the witch, Astrophel, for witchcraft is the unholy opposition
of a demon to the Deity. Yet in your fate I read my own. But censure not
the poetry of that innocent romance that lights up the legends of the
berry-brown sibyl, whether she be a _tirauna_ prowling in the streets of
Madrid, or a gipsy perched upon the heath-brow of Norwood; for theirs
are _happy_ prophecies. Yet if, like Astrophel, I am to be the slave of
philosophy, let me at least make “a dying and a swan-like end.”
It was among the heath-valleys, where nature lay in wild repose around
the place of my birth, that I first met the glance of a gipsy’s eye. On
the northern side of that beautiful sandhill in Surrey, that rears its
purple and turret-crowned crest between the chalk hills and the weald,
there is a green and bosky glen, the “Valley Lonesome,” Along the waste
of _Broadmoor_, that spreads between the brow of _Leith-Hill_ and the
Roman camp of _Anstie-bury_, comes rippling down the crystal streamlet
of the _Till_, which, blending with a torrent that leaps from a lofty
sand-rock, steals away amid mosses and cardamines, and cuckoo-flowers;
now gliding between its emerald banks, now swelling into a broader
sheet, beneath the beech woods of _Wotton_, the ancient seat of the
Evelyns. There the willows dip their silver blossoms, and the violet,
almost hidden beneath them, fills the air with sweetness. There the wild
briar wreaths in light festoons its tiny roses, and the passion-flower,
entwining its luxuriant tendrils around the aspen and the sycamore,
hangs its beautiful blue stars in rich profusion. And there, among the
boughs of lofty elms whose shadows in the early morning darken the
casements of _Tillingbourne_, a colony of rooks hang their woody nests;
and the murmurs of the ringdove, nestling within the woods of Wotton and
the Rookery, are heard in the golden noon and sunset of June, floating
around this leafy paradise.
It was on such an eve that my thoughts had faded into slumber; and when
my eyelids oped, there was a form of embrowned beauty before me so wild,
yet so majestic, that Cleopatra, in the garb of an Egyptian slave-girl,
might have stolen upon my sleep: so scant of clothing, so lovely of form
and feature, she was like an almond-flower upon a leafless branch. Her
expression was full of beautiful contrasts, for, while her eaglet eye
went into my being, there was a languid smile on her ruddy lip, as she
were about to syllable my own destiny; and, indeed, she _did_ unfold to
me many things which have been most strangely worked out and verified in
my life. I wept at some of these foretellings, and she said, “Tears were
the pearls that gem the rose-leaves of life.” I smiled at others, and
she said, “Smiles were the sunlight that warmed their swelling leaflets
into beauty.”
Throughout that summer night, when all were sleeping, save two romantic
girls, she unfolded to me the secrets of her tribe, and a mine of
mysteries learned from a Bohemian _Maugrabee_. She told me how, and why,
the Druids, when the moon was six days old, cut the _misseltoe_ with a
golden knife; how the _vervain_ was gathered with the left hand, at the
rising of the dog-star; and the _lunaria_ was valueless, if not picked
by moonlight; how the _roan-wood_, and the _Banyan seedling_, and the
four-leaved _shamrock_, bore a charm in their tender leaves against
every ill of life. In nature, she said, there is no bane without its
antidote, were the intellect of man ripe for its discovery. There are
corals and green jaspers, carved into the forms of dragons and lizards,
hung round an infant’s neck, for the cure of an ague; the
crimson-spotted _heliotropium_, to staunch a flow of blood; a wrapper of
scarlet-cloth, to mitigate the virulence of small-pox; the blue-flannel,
_nine times_ _dyed_, to allay the pains of rheumatism; and the magic
word _Abracadabra_, to sooth the disorders of a nerve. And, above all,
that wondrous _weapon-salve of sympathy_, which once healed on the
instant the wound of Ulysses, and that which the dainty Ariel gave to
Miranda, to charm Hippolito to life and health; and that with which the
lady of Branxholme _salved_ the broken lance, when William of Deloraine
was healed.
It will be long ere from my memory fade this vision of Charlotte
Stanley. In pity, Evelyn, leave me this one romance of my young
life,—the sheet and taper, nay, the ducking-stool for the witch, if you
will, but deign to bestow one smile upon the gipsies.
Remember the story of the Sibylline Tables. If Sextus Tarquin had not
frowned on the _Roman_ gipsy, she had not burned six of those precious
volumes, which, from the massive cabinets of stone made to enclose the
three that were preserved, prove that the Roman thought them priceless.
One smile, Evelyn, for my sibyl.
EV. Not in memory of the Sibylline Tables, but for your own sake, dear
Castaly. Although the innocence of your nut-brown sibyl is not so clear,
and I am somewhat jealous, too, of that _white magic_ of hers, which
hath won the belief of so many minds the reverse of illiterate, who,
from the Chaldean even to Bacon and William Lilly, have spurned
philosophy, and even divinity, and pinned their faith upon a gipsy’s
sleeve, and doted on the inspiration of an astrologer.
IDA. Forgetful, it would seem, that the wicked king of Babylon found the
devout Daniel, and Hananiah, and Michael, and Azariah, _ten times
better_ than all his magi and astrologers.
These are the antiquaries who possess the last relic of the true cross;
or the last morsel of Shakspere’s mulberry, of which last bit there may
be about ten thousand; such are they who would pen learned theses on the
disputed place of sepulture of St. Denys, and _determine_ the question,
too, although one of his heads is in the cathedral of Bamberg, another
in the church of Saint Vitus in the castle of Prague; one of his hands
in a chapel at Munich; one of his _bodies_, minus one hand, in the
keeping of the monks of Saint Emmeram at Regensberg; while the monks of
Saint Denys possess another, his head being preserved in the third
shrine of the treasury in their cathedral. These may be innocent
follies, but superstition, alas! will not always stop here; fanaticism
soon descends to self-infliction, or to cruelty, and in that moment it
becomes a black stain on the heart of man. Yet, even for the tortures of
the Inquisition (so exquisite, that we might believe them the
suggestions of a devil), the jesuit, Macedo, has put forth this profane
justification: that the bloody tribunal was first instituted by the
Deity, in the condemnation of Cain and the bricklayers of Babel.
EV. Such was the trial of _ordeal_ instituted for the test of innocence.
Among the Anglo-Saxons, as all the chronicles of their history will
show, this mode of trial prevailed; as in the ordeals of the _Cross_, of
_boiling water_ and of the _hot iron_; of _cold water_, or _drowning_;
and of the _corsned_, or consecrated cake. Equally savage was the trial
for murder, so prevalent in Scotland, especially the institution of
their _Bahr-recht_, or “Right of the bier.” Among the “decisions” of
Lord Fountainhall, you may read of legends almost incredible. Philip,
the son of Sir James Standfield, was executed because, in lifting the
corpse of his murdered father from its bier, blood welled forth from his
wound; and the Laird of Auchindrane was tortured, because a corpse
chanced to bleed on the approach of a little girl, who, I believe, was
merely one of his domestics.
But waving these profanations, the reliques of a darker age, let me have
a word with Astrophel on parting. The seeming _fulfilment of many a
sibylline prophecy_ is perfectly clear _as to its source_. There may be
_coincidence_, as in the dream; or _faith_ and _inducement_ may impart
an energy of action, which may itself work a wonder, or accomplish that
end which is referred to a special power.
At the siege of Breda, in 1625, when fatigue and abstinence had well
nigh reduced the garrison to prostration and despair, the Prince of
Orange practised this pious fraud on his soldiers:—He pretended to have
obtained a charmed liquor, so concentrated, that (on the principles of
homœopathy) four drops would saturate a gallon of water with restorative
virtues; and with so much skill was this administered by the physicians,
that a _general restoration was speedily effected_.
You remember, Astrophel, the temptation of Diocletian. From Flavius
Vopiscus we learn, that he was paying the Druidess of Brabant, with whom
he lodged. “When I am emperor,” he said, “I will be more generous.”
“Nay,” said the Druidess, “_you shall be emperor, when you have killed
the_ BOAR.” He hunted and killed boars incessantly, but the purple was
not offered to him. At length, the Emperor Numerianus was murdered by
Arrius _Aper_. This was the eventful moment, and, transfixing the heart
of Aper with his sword, he said, “I have slain the boar!” and the
imperial crown was his.
Is not this, too, the counterpart of that seeming prophecy of the Weird
Sisters, which made Macbeth a murderer and a king?
There was an enchanted stone at Scone, in Scotland, the palladium of
Scottish liberty, for it was believed that the lord of that spot on
which the stone lay, should bear sovereign sway. King Edward bore this
talisman away in triumph; and Scotland, _depressed by its loss_, became
a vassal of the English crown.
And this faith may invest the merest trifle with a spell. Sir Matthew
Hale was presiding in his court on the trial of a witch. She had cured
many diseases by a charm in her possession; and the evidence seemed
conclusive of her guilt. But when the judge himself looked on this
charm, behold! it was a scrap of paper, inscribed with a Latin sentence,
which, in default of money, _he himself_, while on the circuit, had
given many years before, in a merry mood, to mine host, by way of
reckoning.
Among the many analogies to this story in ancient times, there was the
potent poison-charm or antidote of Mithridates, King of Pontus. Its
_effect_ was supreme. And what its composition? twenty leaves of rue,
one grain of salt, two nuts, and two dried figs!
Now you will remember that the wizard and the ministers of these charms,
even among savages, were also their physicians, and, among pagans and
papists, their priests. It is clear that the sensitiveness of mind and
body _under disease_, when the first were consulted, and under the
influence of superstitious fear, instilled by the priesthood, rendered
them impressible to the most trifling causes.
Even in minds of superior natural energy, from the instilment of
superstitious ideas _in infancy_, a blind faith will often become
paramount. Such a mind, and so influenced, was Byron’s; and on such a
faith he once stole an agate bead from a lady, who had told him it was
an antidote to love. It failed: had it not, Byron might have been a
happier man; but the world would have been ’reft of poesy, the
brightest, yet the darkest, that ever flashed on the heart and mind of
man.
Sir Humphrey Davy, you may recollect, “knew a man of very high dignity,
who never went out shooting without a bittern’s claw fastened to his
button-hole by a riband, which he thought ensured him good luck.”
To illustrate the _innocence_ of your gipsy, Castaly, hear this story.
“About forty years ago, a young lady, afterwards Mrs. W——, rallied her
companions aloud for listening to the predictions of an itinerant gipsy,
when the latter malignantly threatened her to beware of her first
confinement. She was shortly afterwards married; and, as the period of
her peril approached, it became evident to her friends that the
remembrance of the wizard malediction began to fasten upon her spirits.
She survived her time only a few days: and the medical attendants, who
were men of eminence, stated it as their opinion, that mental
prepossession alone could be admitted as the cause of her death; not one
unfavourable circumstance having occurred to explain it.
“And some melancholy illusion of this nature induced fatality in the
case of another lady, (Mrs. S.) who, according to the statement of the
venerable Mr. Cline, reluctantly submitted to the removal of a small
tumour in her breast. Unexpectedly, and without any apparent cause, she
died, on the morning following the operation. It was then for the first
time ascertained that she had prognosticated her death, and the
impression that she should not survive had taken so strong a possession
of her mind, that her minutest household arrangements were preconcerted,
as appeared by the papers found in her cabinet.”
I believe that many modern instances of gradual and almost imperceptible
decay, may be referred to the influence both of melancholy prophecies
and visions on the mind, although their agency may be unsuspected, and
as obscure as that of the poisonous herbs of the Thessalian Erichtho, or
the sorceress of Neapolis, or the _aqua tofana_ of the _Italians_.
And superstitious fear may induce a _sudden_ death. Alfred, a nobleman,
was one of the conspirators against the Saxon Athelstan. To justify
himself from the accusation, he went to Rome, that he might make oath of
his innocence before John, the pope. On the instant he took the oath he
was _convulsed_, and, in three days, _died_.
Then as to the language of the stars:—as the phrenologist is much
indebted to the principles of Lavater in forming his estimate of
character, so I believe of the astrologer. The aspect of the _face_ is
not always disregarded in his prophecy, while he seems to observe only
the aspect of the stars. And although there is often a very strange
precision in his guesses, yet there was once a curious incident in my
own presence, from which we may learn something of this secret. On a
visit to a learned astrologer, (who might rest his fame on another art
in which he is so eminent,) our fortunes, past and future, were told
with extreme minuteness, and, I confess, with many coincidences of
former times. One was reminded by the seer of a state of deprivation
which he endured in the year 18—, in the Mediterranean. The officer
remembered in that year being becalmed in a voyage to Malta, and, under
a sultry sky with parching thirst, enduring the want of water for many
days. This was conclusive of the fidelity of the planets, until we
discovered that the horoscope was imperfect, for the officer had given
to the astrologer the _wrong date of his birth_.
CAST. And this, sir, is your Philosophy of Mystery? Oh for the
forethought of my sibyl, that I might learn my own fate for listening to
this treason against the throne of fancy, on the steps of which I have
so long offered up my homage—this ruthless spoliation of her dreamy
kingdom!
EV. Let me for once play the sibyl, fair Castaly, and whisper the
penalty in your ear——
IDA. A lesson in natural philosophy; and the apt scholar, as I read it
on her cheek, has in a moment learned it all by heart; o’ershadowing all
her bright visions of earth and its romances.
EV. What marvel that a daughter of earth should be so apt in its
philosophy?—
“For half her thoughts were of its sun,
And half were of its show’rs.”
But it is not so easy to shake the throne of fancy, or to lay the genius
of romance. He will ever wave his wand of enchantment over the human
mind. The poet will still build his air-castles, and the ghost-seer
indulge in his wild visions of nonentity.
The wonders of creation will still affect us, according to the quality
of intellect or genius, or the constitution or cultivation of the mind.
The poor Indian will still “see God in clouds, and hear him in the
wind,” and the untutored rustic be startled by the shadow of a shade. To
him the slightest change in the regular course of nature will still be a
special miracle: thunder, the awful voice of Divine reproof; lightning,
the flashes of Divine displeasure; the scintillations of the aurora, the
spectral forms of contending armies; and the comet foretel the wreck of
mighty empires. Against this untutored devotion I would not breathe a
thought,—it is the voice of the Deity speaking to the savage.
But it is the privilege, the duty of intellect, to think more deeply of
the physiology of nature; and to learn from the physical sciences, its
real utility in the grand scheme of the creation.
Philosophy, rising from the sublime study of these beautiful phenomena,
regards them as the pure effect of those elemental laws, by which the
integrity of the universe is preserved. And what ought this philosophy
to teach us? Not the superstition of the bigot—for the age of special
miracles is, for the present, past; not the pride of the fatalist, who
refers all to chance and necessity; not the mania of the astrologer, who
plumes himself on his prophetic wisdom, and presumes to interpret to the
letter the mysterious voice of his Creator; but that true wisdom, which
threw over Boyle, and Locke, and Newton, the mantle of humility and
devotion.
* * * * *
The autumn floods had descended from the mountains of Gwent; the banks
of the meandering Wye were desolate, and her woods leafless; yet the
Abbey of Tintern was still majestic and unchanged.
It had been decided, that when the summer sun shone again on Wyndcliff,
the wanderers should revisit the beautiful valleys that lay beneath it,
in memory of happy hours; but ere this was fulfilled, changes manifold
had come over their destiny, from which might be fashioned a true
love-story.
For Astrophel, Ida had unconsciously worked a spell of natural
witchcraft, and his wild thoughts were ever chastened by the pure light
of her devotion. And Evelyn almost confessed to Castaly, that there
might be a sort of animal magnetism. He has neglected the study of the
atomic theory, for the contemplation of the animated atoms that play
around his domestic hearth; and the heart and life of Castaly, a poetry
in themselves, have since interwoven many a blushing flower on the
classic pages of his philosophy.