MAGNETISM.--SYMPATHY.--THE RETURN OF ELEMENTS TO ELEMENTS.
Daily did the health of Volktman decline; Lucilla was the only one
ignorant of his danger. She had never seen the gradual approaches of
death: her mother’s abrupt and rapid illness made the whole of her
experience of disease. Physicians and dark rooms were necessarily
coupled in her mind with all graver maladies; and as the astrologer,
wrapt in his calculations, altered not any of his habits, and was
insensible to pain, she fondly attributed his occasional complaints to
the melancholy induced by seclusion. With sedentary men, diseases being
often those connected with the Organisation of the heart, do not usually
terminate suddenly: it was so with Volktman.
One day he was alone with Godolphin, and their conversation turned upon
one of the doctrines of the old Magnetism, a doctrine which, depending
as it does so much upon a seeming reference to experience, survived the
rest of its associates, and is still not wholly out of repute among the
wild imaginations of Germany.
“One of the most remarkable and abstruse points in what students
call metaphysics,” said Volktman, “is sympathy! the first principle,
according to some, of all human virtue. It is this, say they, which
makes men just, humane, charitable. When one who has never heard of the
duty of assisting his neighbour, sees another drowning, he plunges into
the water and saves him. Why? because involuntarily, and at once, his
imagination places himself in the situation of the stranger: the pain he
would experience in the watery death glances across him: from this pain
he hastens,--without analysing its cause, to deliver himself.
“Humanity is thus taught him by sympathy: where is this sympathy
placed?--in the nerves: the nerves are the communicants with outward
nature; the more delicate the nerves, the finer the sympathies; hence,
women and children are more alive to sympathy than men. Well, mark me:
do not these nerves have attraction and sympathy---not only with human
suffering, but with the powers of what is falsely termed inanimate
nature? Do not the wind, the influences of the weather and the seasons,
act confessedly upon them? and if one part of nature, why not another,
inseparably connected too with that part? If the weather and seasons
have sympathy with the nerves, why not the moon and the stars, by
which the weather and the seasons are influenced and changed? Ye of the
schools may allow that sympathy originates some of our actions; I say it
governs the whole world--the whole creation! Before the child is born,
it is this secret affinity which can mark and stamp him with the witness
of his mother’s terror or his mother’s desire.”
“Yet,” said Godolphin, “you would scarcely, in your zeal for sympathy,
advocate the same cause as Edricius Mohynnus, who cured wounds by a
powder, not applied to the wound, but to the towel that had been dipped
in its blood?”
“No,” answered Volktman: “it is these quacks and pretenders that have
wronged all sciences, by clamouring for false deductions. But I do
believe of sympathy, that it has a power to transport ourselves out of
the body and reunite us with the absent. Hence, trances, and raptures,
in which the patient, being sincere, will tell thee, in grave
earnestness, and with minute detail, of all that he saw, and heard, and
encountered, afar off, in other parts of the earth, or even above the
earth. As thou knowest the accredited story of the youth, who, being
transported with a vehement and long-nursed desire to see his mother,
did, through that same desire, become as it were rapt, and beheld her,
being at the distance of many miles, and giving and exchanging signs of
their real and bodily conference.”
Godolphin turned aside to conceal an involuntary smile at this grave
affirmation; but the mystic, perhaps perceiving it, continued yet more
eagerly:--
“Nay, I myself, at times, have experienced such trance, if trance it
be; and have conversed with them who have passed from the outward
earth--with my father and my wife. And,” continued he, after a
moment’s pause, “I do believe that we may, by means of this power of
attraction--this elementary and all-penetrative sympathy, pass away, in
our last moments, at once into the bosom of those we love. For, by the
intent and rapt longing to behold the Blest and to be amongst them, we
may be drawn insensibly into their presence, and the hour being come
when the affinity between the spirit and the body shall be dissolved,
the mind and desire, being so drawn upward, can return to earth no
more. And this sympathy, refined and extended, will make, I imagine,
our powers, our very being, in a future state. Our sympathy being only,
then, with what is immortal, we shall partake necessarily of that nature
which attracts us; and the body no longer clogging the intenseness
of our desires, we shall be able by a wish to transport ourselves
wheresoever we please,--from star to star, from glory to glory,
charioted and winged by our wishes.”
Godolphin did not reply, for he was struck with the growing paleness
of the mystic, and with a dreaming and intent fixedness that seemed
creeping over his eyes, which were usually bright and restless. The day
was now fast declining, Lucilla entered the room, and came caressingly
to her father’s side.
“Is the evening warm, my child?” said the astrologer.
“Very mild and warm,” answered Lucilla.
“Give me your arm then,” said he; “I will sit a little while without the
threshold.”
The Romans live in flats, as at Edinburgh, and with a common stair.
Volktman’s abode was in the secondo piano. He descended the stairs with
a step lighter than it had been of late; and sinking into a seat without
the house, seemed silently and gratefully to inhale the soft and purple
air of an Italian sunset.
By and by the sun had entirely vanished: and that most brief but most
delicious twilight, common to the clime, had succeeded. Veil-like and
soft, the mist that floats at that hour between earth and heaven, lent
its transparent shadow to the scene around them: it seemed to tremble as
for a moment, and then was gone. The moon arose, and cast its light over
Volktman’s earnest countenance,--over the rich bloom and watchful eye
of Lucilla,--over the contemplative brow and motionless figure of
Godolphin. It was a group of indefinable interest: the Earth was so
still, that the visionary might well have fancied it had hushed itself,
to drink within its quiet heart the voices of that Heaven in whose
oracles he believed. Not one of the group spoke,--the astrologer’s mind
and gaze were riveted above; and neither of his companions wished to
break the meditations of the old and dreaming man.
Godolphin, with folded arms and downcast eyes, was pursuing his own
thoughts; and Lucilla, to whom Godolphin’s presence was a subtle and
subduing intoxication, looked indeed upward to the soft and tender
heavens, but with the soul of the loving daughter of earth.
Slowly, nor marked by his companions, the gaze of the mystic deepened
and deepened in its fixedness.
The minutes went on; and the evening waned, till a chill breeze,
floating down from the Latian Hills, recalled Lucilla’s attention to
her father. She covered him tenderly with her own mantle, and whispered
gently in his ear her admonition to shun the coldness of the coming
night. He did not answer; and on raising her voice a little higher, with
the same result, she looked appealingly to Godolphin. He laid his hand
on Volktman’s shoulder; and, bending forward to address him,--was
struck dumb by the glazed and fixed expression of the mystic’s eyes. The
certainty flashed across him; he hastily felt Volktman’s pulse--it
was still. There was no doubt left on his mind; and yet the daughter,
looking at him all the while, did not even dream of this sudden and
awful stroke. In silence, and unconsciously, the strange and solitary
spirit of the mystic had passed from its home--in what exact instant of
time, or by what last contest of nature, was not known.