Part 13

EV. In that awful moment, when the spirit is

“Soon from his cell of clay To burst a seraph in the blaze of day,”

the mind is prone to yield to those feelings which it might perhaps in the turmoil of the busy world and at another period deem superstition. There is something in the approach of death of so holy and so solemn a nature, something so unlike life in the feeling of the dying, that in this transition, although we cannot compass the mystery, some vision of another world may steal over the retiring spirit, imparting to it a proof of its immortality. I do not fear to yield for once my approval of this devout passage of Sir Thomas Brown:—“It is observed that men sometimes upon the hour of their departure do speak and reason above themselves, for then the soul begins to be freed from the ligaments of the body, and to discourse in a strain above mortality.” It is on the verge of eternity, and the laws and principles of vitality may be already repealed by the Being who conferred them.—The arguments, then, regarding the phenomena of life may fail, when life has all but ceased.

With this admission, I may counsel Astrophel as to the danger of adducing heathen history or fiction in proof of this solemn question.

CAST. And yet Shakspere, for one, with a poet’s license, brings before us, as you do, the dying hour, as the cause of prophetic vision. John of Gaunt, on his death-bed, mutters,—

“Methinks I am a prophet new inspired, And thus expiring do foretell of him,”

and then predicts the fate of Richard.

And remember, the dying Hotspur says,—

——“now could I prophecy, But that the icy hand of death,” &c.

EV. Well, I will not controvert your creed, Astrophel; rather let me illustrate some of your apparent mysteries by simple analogy.

As in these extreme moments of life, so in the hour of extreme danger, when an awful fate is impending, and the world and our sacred friendships are about to be lost to us, a vision of our absent friends will pass before us with all the light of reality. We read in the writings of Dr. Conolly of a person who, in danger of being swamped on the Eddystone rock, saw the phantoms of his family passing distinctly before him; and these are the words of the English Opium-Eater:—“I was once told by a near relative of mine that, having in her childhood fallen into a river, and being on the very verge of death but for the critical assistance which reached her, she saw in a moment her whole life in its minutest incidents arrayed before her simultaneously, as in a mirror, and she had a faculty developed as suddenly for comprehending the whole and every part.”

Now, although the coming on of death is often attended by that slight delirium indicated by the babbling of green fields, and the playing with flowers, and the picking of the bedclothes, and the smiling on the fingers’ ends, yet in others some oppressive or morbid cause of insanity may be removed by the moribund condition. In the words of Aretæus,—“the system has thrown off many of its impurities, and the soul, left naked, was free to exercise such energies as it still possessed.”

I will glance in illustration at these interesting cases:—from Zimmerman, of an insane woman of Zurich, who, “a few hours before her death, became perfectly sensible and wonderfully eloquent;”—from Dr. Perceval, of a female idiot, who, as she was dying of consumption, evinced the highest powers of intellect;—from Dr. Marshall, of the maniac, who became completely rational some hours previous to his dissolution;—and from Dr. Hancock, of the Quaker, who, from the condition of a drivelling idiot, became shortly before his death so completely rational, as to call his family together, and, as his spirit was passing from him, bestow on them with pathetic solemnity his last benediction.

Thus your impressive records are clearly explained by pathology; and, perhaps unconscious of this, Mrs. Opie has a fine illustration in her “Father and Daughter:”—the mind of the maniac parent being illumined before his death by a beam of reason.

But in the languid brain of an idiot excitement may even produce rationality.

Samuel Tuke tells us of a domestic servant, who lapsed into a state of complete idiocy. Some time after, she fell into typhus fever, and as this progressed, there was a real development of mental power. At that stage when delirium lighted up the minds of others, she was rational, because the excitement merely brought up the nervous energy to its proper point. As the fever abated, however, she sunk into her idiot apathy, and thus continued until she died. It was but the transient gleam of reason.

PHANTASY FROM CEREBRAL CONGESTION.—OPIUM.

——“Have we eaten of the insane root, That takes the reason prisoner?” MACBETH.

EV. The contrasts to these phantoms of blind superstition, are those of the overstrained condition of the mind. The Creator has ordained the brain to be the soil in which the mind is implanted or developed. This brain, like the corn-field, must have its fallow, or it is exhausted and reduced in the degree of its high qualities. In our intellectual government, therefore, we should ever adopt that happy medium, equally remote from the bigotry of the untutored, and the ultra refinement of the too highly cultivated mind.

It is not essential that I should now offer you more than a hint, that the essence of the gloomy ghosts of deep study, like the melancholy phantoms and oppressive demons of the night-mare, consists in the accumulation of black blood about the brain and the heart; and a glance at phrenology would explain to you how the influence of that blood on the various divisions of the brain will call up in the mind these “Hydras and Gorgons, and Chimeras dire.”

The learned Pascal constantly saw a gulph yawning at his side, but he was aware of his illusion. He was, however, always strapped in his chair, lest he should fall into this gulph, especially while he was working the celebrated problem of the cycloidal curve.

A distinguished nobleman, who but lately guided the helm of state in England, was often annoyed by the spectre of a bloody head;—a strange coincidence with the phantom of the Count Duke d’Olivarez, the minister of Philip of Spain.

From Dr. Conolly we learn the curious illusion of a student of anatomy, who, during his ardent devotion to his study, confidently believed that there was a town in his deltoid muscle.

And, from Dr. Abercrombie, the case of a gentleman of high literary attainments, who, when closely reading in his study, was repeatedly annoyed by the intrusive visits of a little old woman in a black bonnet and mantle, with a basket on her arm. So filmy, however, was this phantom, that the door-lock was seen through her. Supposing she had mistaken her way, he politely showed her the door, and she instantly vanished. It was the change of posture which effected this disappearance, by altering the circulation of the brain-blood, then in a state of partial stagnation.

My friend, Dr. Johnson, has told me of a gentleman of great science, who conceived that he was honoured by the frequent visits of spectres. They were at first refined and elegant both in manners and in conversation, which, on one occasion, assumed a witty turn, and quips, and puns, and satire, were the order of the evening; so that he was charmed with his ghostly visitors, and sought no relief. On a sudden, however, they changed into demoniac fiends, uttering expressions of the most degraded and unholy nature. He became alarmed, and depletion soon cured him of his phantasy.

A Scotch lawyer had long laboured under this kind of monomania, which at length proved fatal. His physician had long seen that some secret grief was gnawing the heart and sucking the life-blood of his patient, and he at last extorted the confession, that a skeleton was ever watching him from the foot of his bed. The physician tried various modes to dispel the illusion, and once placed himself in the field of the vision, and was not a little terrified when the patient exclaimed, that he saw the skull peering at him over his left shoulder.

The “Martyr Philosopher,” too, in the “Diary of a Physician,” saw, shortly preceding his death, a figure in black deliberately putting away the books in his study, throwing his pens and ink into the fire, and folding up his telescope, as if they were now useless. The truth is he himself had been engaged in that occupation, but it was his own disordered imagination that raised the spectre.

You will believe from these illustrations, Astrophel, that Seneca is right in his aphorism,—