Part 11

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 of distinct shapes. I have ever thought the vision of Eliphaz the Temanite more solemn, because an undefined shadow: “A vision is before our face, but we cannot discern the form thereof.” And where the profane poets 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 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 see The steady aspect of a clear large star, But nothing more.

SPIRIT. We have no form beyond 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 a shadowy being.” 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 is instinctive, 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 the nervous 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 could not sleep. 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—the materiel of 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.

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.