and fears, from spirits nervously conscious, amidst the hurry and glare of life's daily presentiments, of the growing and deepening shadow of the Eternal and the Infinite. He will discover no infrequent traces of the Old Superstition that dark theory of the Invisible World, in which our Puritan ancestors had united the wild extravagances of Indian tradition with the familiar and common fantasies of their native land; and that gloomy, indefinite awe of an agency of Evil which their peculiar interpretations of the Sacred Volume had inspired ;-a theory which threw a veil of mystery over the plainest passages of the great laws of the universe agitating their entire community with signs, and wonders, and dark marvels-poisoning the fountains of education, and constituting a part of their religion. He will find that we, too, can "listen to our own fond thoughts Until they seem no more as Fancy's children; enacting daily in our midst marvels which throw far into shadow the simple witchcraft of our ancestors. What are those but present manifestations of the unearthly and the superhuman bursting up through their crust of conventional and common-place existence? Nor is this all. There is scarcely a superstition of the past three centuries which has not at this very time more or less hold upon individual minds among us. In the belief that facts illustrative of this will afford some amusement to the reader, I shall throw together such as occur to my mind, and which find in New England "a local habitation." They may be classed under the heads of Ghosts, Witches, Haunted Houses, Trances and Visions, Warnings, &c. It has been said, with far more poetry than truth, that "The last lingering fiction of the brain, The church-yard GHOST, is laid at rest again." Yea, put them on a prophet's robe, endow There is a lurking belief in nearly all them With prophet-voices;" -that our "young men can see visions, and our old men dream dreams." What means, for instance, that strange, vast, unsubstantial fabric, rising suddenly, like the genii-built palaces of the Arabian Nights, in the heart of Boston? Consider well that Temple of the Second Advent-its thronging thousands, with wild, awe-stricken faces turned towards the East, like Mussulmen to their Kebla, in hourly expectation of the down-rushing of the fiery mystery of the Apocalypse; waiting with trembling eagerness and "not unpleasing horror" to behold with the eye of flesh the tremendous pageant before which the elements shall melt and the heavens flee away-the Baptism of a World in fire! In what age or quarter of the world has the Supernatural in man taken a more decided and definite shape than this? Look at the nightly gatherings of the "Disciples of the Newness,"-grey, thought-worn manhood, and young, dreamy beauty, catching inspiration from the Orphic utterance of modern prophecy, and making glad the weary Present with sunny glimpses of a Transcendental Millennium. Look at Magnetism, with its fearfully suggestive phenomena, minds, that there may be some truth in the idea of departed spirits revisiting the friends and places which were familiar to them in life. I am not disposed to enter into an argument in behalf of this belief. It does not lack greater and better names than mine in its support. For five thousand years the entire human family have given it credence. It was a part of the wild faith of the Scandinavian worshippers of Odin. It gave a mournful beauty to the battle-songs of the old Erse and Gaelic bards. It shook the stout heart of the ancient Roman. It blended with all the wild and extravagant religions of the East. How touching is that death-scene of Cyrus, as told by Xenophon, when the dying monarch summoned his children about him, entreating them to love one another, and to remember that their father's ghost would be ever at their side, to rejoice with their rejoicing, and sorrow with their sorrow! All nations, all ages, as Cicero de Divinatione justly affirms, have given full credit to this ghostdoctrine; and this fact alone, Dr. Johnson argues, fully confirms it. The Doctor himself believed in the ghost of Cock-lane. Luther saw, talked, and fought with spirits. Swedenborg made them his familiar ac quaintances. Coleridge, and his friend, the Apostle of the Unknown Tongues, were spectre-seers. Against so much evidence shall we urge the apparently common-sense view of the subject, that the apparition of a disembodied spirit to the sensual organs of sight, hearing, and touch, is a solecism in philosophy, -a subversion of all known laws of matter and mind? What will that avail with the man who has actually seen a ghost? Fact before philosophy always. If a man is certain he has seen the thing, there is an end of the matter. "Seeing," as the old adage has it, "is believing." Disbelief under such circumstances would justly subject him to the charge which pious father Baxter brought against those who doubted in relation to Cotton Mather's witches: "He must be an obstinate Sadducee who questions it." For myself, I cannot dismiss the whole matter with a sneer. If I cannot believe, I cannot entirely disbelieve. Our whole being is a mystery. Above, below, around us, all is fearful and wonderful. The shadow of a solemn uncertainty rests over all. Who shall set limits to the capacity of the soul when its incarnation has ended, and it enters unfettered, unconfined, into a new state of being? The objection, that whatever in its new sphere may be the condition and powers of the freed spirit, it can never manifest itself to mortal organs, lies with equal force against the scriptural account of angel visitations, and the apparition of Samuel. The angels which John saw in his awful prophet-trance on Patmos, were the spirits of those who had departed from this stage of being. The idea of such appearances has lent its deepest charms to American poetry and romance. What can be more beautiful than those lines of Longfellow ? "Ere the evening lamps are lighted, And like phantoms, grim and tall, Shadows from the fitful firelight Dance upon my parlor wall; The beloved ones, the true-hearted, "With a slow and noiseless footstep With those deep and tender eyes, The lamented Otway Curry-the few fragments of whose dreamy and mysterious poetry have given his memory a place in many hearts-has made this idea of spiritual visitation his familiar theme. There is an exquisite beauty in the following, from his "Armies of the Eve" : "Not in the golden morning shall faded forms return, "The dim and shadowy armies of our unquiet dreams, II. "One of their fables of a church-yard carcass raised and set a strutting."-Bishop Warburton on Prodigies. "Gorgons, and hydras, and chimeras-dire stories of Celano and the harpies-may reproduce themselves in the brain of superstition-but they were there before. They are transcripts, types-the archetypes are in us and eternal."-Essays of Elia. I CLOSED my last sheet with a special reference to ghosts. Modern scepticism and philosophy have not yet routed out the idea of supernatural visitation from the New England mind. Here and there-oftenest in these still, fixed, valley-sheltered, unvisited nooks and villages,-the Rip Van Winkles of our progressive and restless population may be still found, devout believers schoolmistress worthy of the days of the two Mathers. There are those yet living in this very neighborhood who remember, and relate with an awe which half a century has not abated, the story of Ruth Blaye, and the GHOST CHILD! Ruth was a young woman of lively temperament and great personal beauty. While engaged as the teacher of a school in the little town of Southampton, N. H. (whose hills roughen the horizon with their snowy outline within view of my window at this very moment), she was invited to spend an evening at the dwelling of one of her young associates. Several persons were present, of both sexes. The sun, just setting, poured its soft rich light into the apartment. Suddenly, in the midst of unwonted gaiety, the young uttered a frightful shriek, and was seen gazing with a countenance of intensest horror at the open window; and pointing with her rigid, outstretched arm at an object which drew at once the attention of her companions. In the strong light of sunset lay upon the sill of the open casement, a dead infant―visible to all for a single moment, and vanishing before the gazers could command words to express their amazement. The wretched Ruth was the first to break the silence. "It is mine-MINE -MY CHILD!" she shrieked; "he has come for me!" She gradually became more tranquil, but no effort availed to draw from her the terrible secret which was evidently connected with the apparition. She was soon after arrested and brought to trial for the crime of child-murder, found guilty and executed at Portsmouth, N. H. I do not of course vouch for the truth of this story in all respects. "I tell the tale as 'twas told to me." 99 Nearly opposite to my place of residence, on the south side of the Merrimack, stands a house which has long had a bad reputation. One of its recent inmates avers most positively that having on one occasion ventured to sleep in the haunted room, she was visited by a child-ghost which passed through the apartment with a most mournful and unbaby-like solemnity. Some of my unbelieving readers will doubtless smile at this; and deem it no matter of surprise that a young maiden's slumbers should be thus haunted. As the old play-writer hath it: "She blushed and smiled to think upon her dream Of fondling a sweet infant (with a look Like one she will not name) upon her virgin knees." An esteemed friend-a lady of strong mind, of the clear, common-sense cast, not at all troubled with nervous sensibility, and rather deficient in the organs of ideality and wonder than otherwisehas told me that while living with an aged relative, who was at that time in the enjoyment of her usual health, she was terrified by the appearance of a dead body lying by the side of her relative, who was quietly sleeping in her bed. The old lady died soon after, and my friend avers that the corpse as it lay before her recalled in the most minute particulars her recollection of the apparition. She had seen the same before by the side of the living sleeper. A respectable and worthy widow lady, in my neighborhood, professes to be clearly convinced that she saw the spectre of her daughter a little time before her death, while she was yet in perfect health. It crossed the room within a few feet of the mother, in broad day-light. She spoke, but no answer was returned; the countenance of the apparition was fixed and sorrowful. The daughter was at that time absent on a visit to a friend. I could easily mention other cases, some of which have occurred in my immediate vicinity, but the above may serve as a sample of all. I can only say that the character of these ghostseers, in most instances, precludes the idea of imposture or intentional falsehood on their part. Most readers will remember the account which, about a year ago, circulated through all the newspapers, of an apparition seen in Warner, N. H., by two men while watching by the bed-side of a dying neighbor. A red, unnatural light filled the room; a stranger suddenly stood beside them, and fixed his eyes upon the dying man, who writhed and shrunk beneath their ghastly scrutiny. the disappearance of the spectre, the sick man made an effort to speak, and in broken words confessed that many years before he had aided in the murder of the man whose spectral image had just left them. This statement, if I recollect rightly, was made under oath. It is but proper, however, to On mention, that it has been intimated that the spirit seen on this occasion was none other than one of Deacon Giles's sprites of the distillery-one of those bottle-imps which play as fantastic tricks with those who uncork them, as Le Diable Boiteux of the old French novelist did with the student of Salamanca. III. "There are powers Which of themselves our minds impress."- Wordsworth. "Our mothers' mayds have so frayed us with an ugly Divil having hornes on his hedde, fire in his mouth, and a tayle at his back, whereby we starte and are afraid when we heare one cry, Boh !"— Reginald Scott. WARNINGS of death and disastersigns and omens of approaching calamity are as carefully noted at the present day in our rural districts, as they were in ancient Rome. The superstition seems inwrought and permanent-a part of the popular mind. I have rarely met with a person entirely free from its influence. Who has not at times, under circumstances of deep depression, nervous disparagement or physical illness, or in those peculiar moods of the spirit when even "the grasshopper is a burden," felt his flesh creep at the howl of a dog at midnight -the tick of a harmless insect in the wall-any unusual sight or sound the cause of which does not at once suggest itself-things in themselves trivial and meaningless, calling up dark and dread associations? There are, I believe, times when the most material sceptic of us reveals his deep and abiding awe of the invisible and the unknown; when like Eliphaz the Temanite, we feel a "spirit passing before us, the form of which is not discerned." For one, I confess there are seasons when I love to con over Increase Mather's Remarkable Providences, or Dr. More's Continuation of Glanville, or any other chronicle of the marvellous, with which the divines of former days edified the people. I know very well that our modern theologians, as if to atone for the credulity of their order formerly, have unceremoniously turned witchcraft, ghost-seeing, and second sight, into Milton's receptacle of exploded follies and detected impostures: "Over the back side of the world far off, Into a limbo broad and large, and called The paradise of fools;" -that indeed out of their peculiar province, and apart from the phenomena of their vocation, they have become the most thorough skeptics and unbelievers among us. Yet, as Falstaff said of his wit, if they have not the marvellous themselves, they are the cause of it in others. In certain states of mind the very sight of a clergyman in his sombre professional garb, is sufficient to awaken all the wonderful within me. My imagination goes wandering back to the subtle priesthood of mysterious Egypt-I think of Jannes and Jambres-of the _Persian Magi— dim oak-groves with Druid altars, and priests and victims rise before me. Caffre rain-makers, Lapland windwizards, Powahs and Medicine-Men, glide before me like spectres. For what is the priest even of our New England but a living testimony to the truth of the supernatural and the reality of the unseen a man of mystery, walking in the shadow of the ideal worldby profession an expounder of spiritual wonders? Laugh he may at the old tales of astrology and witchcraft and demoniacal possession, but does he not believe and bear testimony to his faith in the reality of that Dark Essence which Scripture more than hints atwhich has modified more or less all the religious systems and speculations of the heathen world-the Arimanes of the Parsee, the Pluto of the Roman mythology, the Devil of the Jew and Christian, the Shitan of the Mussulman-evil in the universe of goodness, darkness in the light of Divine intelligence-in itself the great and crowning mystery from which by no unnatural process of imagination may be deduced everything which our forefathers believed of the spiritual world and supernatural agency? That fearful being with his tributaries and agents-" the Devil and his angels"-how awfully he rises before us in the brief outline limning of the sacred writers? How he glooms, "in shape and gesture proudly eminent," on the immortal canvass of Milton and Dante? What a note of horror does his name throw into the sweet Sabbath psalmody of our churches? What strange dark fancies are connected with the very language of our common law indictments, when our grand juries find under oath that the offence complained of has been committed" at the instigation of the devil?" How hardly effaced are the impressions of childhood! Even at this day, at the mention of the Evil Angel, an image rises before me, like that with which I used especially to horrify myself in an old copy of Pilgrim's Progress. Horned, hoofed, scaly and firebreathing, his caudal extremity twisted tight with rage, I remember him, illustrating the tremendous encounter of Christian in the valley where " Apollyon straddled over the whole breadth of the way." There was another print of the enemy which made no slight impression upon me; it was the frontispiece of an old, smoked, snuff-stained pamphlet, the property of an elderly lady (who had a fine collection of similar wonders, wherewith she was kind enough to edify her young visiters), containing a solemn account of the fate of a wicked dancing party in New Jersey, whose irreverent declaration that they would have a fiddler if they had to send to the lower regions after him, called up the fiend himself, who forthwith commenced playing, while the company danced to the music incessantly, without the power to suspend their exercise until their feet and legs were worn off to the knees! The rude wood-cut represented the Demon Fiddler and his agonized companions literally stumping it up and down in "cotillions, jigs, strathspeys and reels." He would have answered very well to the description of the infernal piper in Tam O'Shanter: "A winnock-bunker in the east There sat Auld Nick in shape o' beast, A towzie tyke, black, grim and large, To gie them music was his charge." To this popular notion of the impersonation of the principle of evil, we are doubtless indebted for the whole dark legacy of witchcraft, possession, demons, &c. How far that notion is now seriously maintained, I am not aware. Certain it is that no public renunciation of it from our great theological authorities has been made. Failing in their efforts to solve the dark problem of the origin of evil, men fall back on the idea of a malignant beingthe antagonism of good. Of this mysterious and dreadful personification, we find ourselves constrained to speak with a degree of that awe and reverence which are always associated with undefined power and the ability to harm. "The devil," says an old writer, "is a dignity, though his glory be somewhat faded and wan, and is to be spoken of accordingly." Cudworth, in his Intellectual System, says that "the inferior gods or demons being all of them able to do us hurt or good, and being also irascible, and therefore provokable by our neglect, it is our interest to appease and pacify them." I have seen persons in that state of the drunkard's malady known as delirium tremens, who verily imagined they could see his Satanic Majesty hovering over them; but do not recollect of ever meeting with but one sane person who has been thus favored. He is a man of strong nerves, sound judgment in ordinary matters, and quite the reverse of superstitious. He states that several years ago, when his mind was somewhat "exercised," to use his own words, on the subject of his religious duties, he was standing one moonlight evening in a meditative mood on the bridge which crosses Little River near its junction with the Merrimack. Suddenly he became sensible of a strange feeling, as if something terrible was near at hand; a vague terror crept over him. knew," said he, in relating the story, "that something bad and frightful was behind me I felt it. And when I did look round, there on the bridge, within a few paces of me, a huge black dog was setting, with the face of a man-a human face, if ever I saw one, turned full up to the moonlight. It remained just long enough to give me a clear view of it, and then vanished; and ever since, when I think of Satan, I call to mind the dog on the bridge.' (To be continued.) "I |