THE SOLILOQUY OF THE SOOTHSAYER.--AN EPISODICAL MYSTERY, INTRODUCED AS
A TYPE OF THE MANY THINGS IN LIFE THAT ARE NEVER ACCOUNTED
FOR.--GRATUITOUS DEVIATIONS FROM OUR COMMON CAREER.
In Leicester Square there is a dim old house, which I have but this
instant visited, in order to bring back more vividly to my recollection
the wild and unhappy being who, for some short time, inhabited its
old-fashioned and gloomy chambers.
In that house, at the time I now speak of, lodged the mysterious
Liehbur. It was late at noon, and she sat alone in her apartment, which
was darkened so as to exclude the broad and peering sun. There was no
trick, nor sign of the fallacious art she professed, visible in the
large and melancholy room. One or two books in the German language lay
on the table beside which she sat: but they were of the recent poetry,
and not of the departed dogmas, of the genius of that tongue. The
enthusiast was alone; and, with her hand supporting her chin, and her
eyes fixed on vacancy, she seemed feeding in silence the thoughts that
flitted to and fro athwart a brain which had for years lost its certain
guide; a deserted mansion, whence the lord had departed, and where
spirits not of this common life had taken up their haunted and desolate
abode. And never was there a countenance better suited to the character
which this singular woman had assumed. Rich, thick, auburn hair was
parted loosely over a brow in which the large and full temples would
have betrayed to a phrenologist the great preponderance which the
dreaming and the imaginative bore over the sterner faculties. Her eyes
were deep, intense, but of the bright and wandering glitter which is so
powerful in its effect on the beholder, because it betokens that thought
which is not of this daily world and inspires that fear, that sadness,
that awe, which few have looked on the face of the insane and not
experienced. Her features were still noble, and of the fair Greek
symmetry of the painter’s Sibyl; but the cheeks were worn and hollow,
and one bright spot alone broke their marble paleness; her lips were,
however, full, and yet red, and by their uncertain and varying
play, gave frequent glimpses of teeth lustrously white; which, while
completing the beauty of her face, aided--with somewhat of a fearful
effect--the burning light of her strange eyes, and the vague, mystic
expression of her abrupt and unjoyous smile. You might see when her
features were, as now, in a momentary repose, that her health was
broken, and that she was not long sentenced to wander over that world
where the soul had already ceased to find its home; but the instant she
spoke, her colour deepened, and the brilliant and rapid alternations of
her countenance deceived the eye, and concealed the ravages of the worm
that preyed within.
“Yes,” said she, at last breaking silence, and soliloquising in the
English tongue, but with somewhat of a foreign accent; “yes, I am in his
city; within a few paces of his home; I have seen him, I have heard him.
Night after night--in rain, and in the teeth of the biting winds, I
have wandered round his home. Ay! and I could have raised my voice, and
shrieked a warning and a prophecy, that should have startled him from
his sleep as the trumpet of the last angel! but I hushed the sound
within my soul, and covered the vision with a thick silence. O God! what
have I seen, and felt, and known, since he last saw me! But we shall
meet again; and ere the year has rolled round, I shall feel the touch of
his lips and die! Die! what calmness, what luxury in the word! The fiery
burthen of this dread knowledge I have heaped upon me, shuffled off;
memory no more; the past, the present, the future exorcised; and a long
sleep, with bright dreams of a lulling sky, and a silver voice, and his
presence!”
The door opened, and a black girl of about ten years old, in the costume
of her Moorish tribe, announced the arrival of a new visitor. The
countenance of Madame Liehbur changed at once into an expression of
cold and settled calmness; she ordered the visitor to be admitted; and
presently, Stainforth Radclyffe entered the room.
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“Thou mistakest me and my lore,” said the diviner; “I meddle not with
the tricks and schemes of the worldly; I show the truth, not garble it.”
“Pshaw!” said Radclyffe, impatiently; “this jargon cannot deceive me.
You exhibit your skill for money. I ask one exertion of it, and desire
you to name your reward. Let us talk after the fashion of this world,
and leave that of the other to our dupes.”
“Yet, thou hast known grief too,” said the diviner, musingly, “and those
who have sorrowed ought to judge more gently of each other. Wilt thou
try my art on thyself, ere thou askest it for others?”
“Ay, if you could restore the dead to my dreams.”
“I can!” replied the soothsayer, sternly.
Radclyffe laughed bitterly. “Away with this talk to me; or, if you would
convince me, raise at once the spectre I desire to see!”
“And dost thou think, vain man,” replied Liehbur, haughtily, “that I
pretend to the power thou speakest of? Yes; but not as the impostors of
old (dull and gross, appealing to outward spells, and spells wrought by
themselves alone) affected to do. I can bring the dead before thee, but
thou thyself must act upon thyself.”
“Mummery! What would you drive at?”
“Wilt thou fast three days, and for three nights abstain from sleep, and
then visit me once again?”
“No, fair deluder; such a preliminary is too much to ask of a Neophyte.
Three days without food, and three nights without sleep! Why, you would
have to raise myself from the dead!”
“And canst thou,” said the diviner, with great dignity, “canst thou hope
that thou wouldst be worthy of a revelation from a higher world--that
for thee the keys of the grave should unlock their awful treasure, and
the dead return to life, when thou scruplest to mortify thy flesh and
loosen the earthly bonds that cumber and chain the spirit? I tell thee,
that only as the soul detaches itself from the frame, can its inner
and purer sense awaken, and the full consciousness of the invisible and
divine things that surround it descend upon its powers.”
“And what,” said Radclyffe, startled more by the countenance and voice
than the words themselves of the soothsayer; “what would you then do,
supposing that I perform this penance?”
“Awaken to their utmost sense, even to pain and torture, the naked
nerves of that Great Power thou callest the Imagination; that Power
which presides over dreams and visions, which kindles song, and lives
in the heart of Melodies; which inspired the Magian of the East and
the Pythian voices--and, in the storms and thunder of savage lands
originated the notion of a God and the seeds of human worship; that vast
presiding Power which, to the things of mind, is what the Deity is to
the Universe itself--the creator of all. I would awaken, I say, that
Power from its customary sleep where, buried in the heart, it folds its
wings, and lives but by fits and starts, unquiet, but unaroused; and
by that Power thou wouldst see, and feel, and know, and through it only
thou wouldst exist. So that it would be with thee, as if the body were
not: as if thou wert already all-spiritual, all-living. So thou wouldst
learn in life that which may be open to thee after death; and so, soul
might now, as hereafter, converse with soul, and revoke the Past, and
sail prescient down the dark tides of the Future. A brief and fleeting
privilege, but dearly purchased: be wise, and disbelieve in it; be
happy, and reject it!”
Radclyffe was impressed, despite himself, by the solemn novelty of this
language, and the deep mournfulness with which the soothsayer’s last
sentence died away.
“And how,” said he, after a pause, “how, and by what arts would you so
awaken the imaginative faculty?”
“Ask not until the time comes for the trial,” answered Liebhur.
“But can you awaken it in all?--the dull, the unideal, as in the musing
and exalted?”
“No! but the dull and unideal will not go through the necessary ordeal.
Few besides those for whom fate casts her great parts in life’s drama,
ever come to that point when I can teach them the Future.”
“Do you mean that your chief votaries are among the great? Pardon me,
I should have thought the most superstitious are to be found among the
most ignorant and lowly.”
“Yes; but they consult only what imposes on their credulity, without
demanding stern and severe sacrifice of time and enjoyment, as I do. The
daring, the resolute, the scheming with their souls intent upon great
objects and high dreams--those are the men who despise the charms of the
moment, who are covetous of piercing the far future, who know how much
of their hitherward career has been brightened, not by genius or nature,
but some strange confluence of events, some mysterious agency of fate.
The great are always fortunate, and therefore mostly seekers into the
decrees of fortune.”
So great is the influence which enthusiasm, right or wrong, always
exercises over us, that even the hard and acute Radclyffe--who had
entered the room with the most profound contempt for the pretensions of
the soothsayer, and partly from a wish to find materials for ridiculing
a folly of the day, partly, it may be from the desire to examine which
belonged to his nature--began to consider in his own mind whether he
should yield to his curiosity, now strongly excited, and pledge himself
to the preliminary penance the diviner had ordained.
The soothsayer continued:--
“The stars, and the clime, and the changing moon have power over us--why
not? Do they not have influence over the rest of nature? But we can only
unravel their more august and hidden secrets, by giving full wing to
the creative spirit which first taught us their elementary nature, and
which, when released from earth, will have full range to wander over
their brilliant fields. Know in one word, the Imagination and the Soul
are one, one indivisible and the same; on that truth rests all my lore.”
“And if I followed your precepts, what other preliminaries would you
enjoin?”
“Not until thou engagest to perform them, will I tell thee more.”
“I engage!”
“And swear?”
“I swear!”
The soothsayer rose--and----
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