twilight. A cold agony crept over me; I buried my head in the bed-clothes, in a child-like fear, and when I again ventured to look up, the spectre had vanished. The event made a strong impression on my mind; and I can scarcely express the feeling of relief which was afforded, a few days after, by a letter from the identical friend in question, informing me of his recovery of health. "It would be a weary task, and one which you would no doubt thank me for declining, to detail the circumstances of a hundred similar visitations, most of which were, in fact, but different combinations of the same illusion. One striking exception I will mention, as it relates to some passages of my early history which you have already heard. "I have never seen Mrs. H since her mar riage. Time, and the continued action of opium, deadening the old sensibilities of the heart and awakening new ones, have effected a wonderful change in my feelings towards her. Little as the confession may argue in favor of my early passion, I seldom think of her, save with a feeling very closely allied to indifference. Yet I have often seen her in my spectral illusions, young and beautiful as ever, but always under circumstances which formed a wide contrast between her spectral appearance and all my recollections of the real person. The spectral face, which I often saw looking in upon me, in my study, when the door was ajar, and visible only in the uncertain lamplight, or peering over me in the moonlight solitude of my bed-chamber, when I was just waking from sleep, was uniformly subject to, and expressive of, some It terrible hate, or yet more terrible anguish. Its first appearance was startling in the extreme. was the face of one of the fabled furies: the demon glared in the eye, the nostril was dilated, the pale lip compressed, and the brow bent and darkened; yet above all, and mingled with all, the supremacy of human beauty was manifest, as if the dream of Eastern superstition had been realized, and a fierce and foul spirit had sought out and animated into a fiendish existence some beautiful sleeper of the grave. The other expression of the countenance of the apparition, that of agony, I accounted for on rational principles. Some years ago I saw, and was deeply affected by, a series of paintings representing the tortures of a Jew in the Holy Inquisition; and the expression of pain in the countenance of the victim I at once recognized in that of the apparition, rendered yet more distressing by the feminine and beautiful features upon which it rested. "I am not naturally superstitious; but, shaken and clouded as my mind had been by the use of opium, I could not wholly divest it of fear when these phantoms beset me. Yet, on all other occasions, save that of their immediate presence, I found no difficulty in assigning their existence to a diseased state of the bodily organs, and a corresponding sympathy of the mind, rendering it capable of receiving and reflecting the false, fantastic, and unnatural images presented to it. 1 1 One of our most celebrated medical writers considers spectral illusion a disease, in which false perceptions take place in some of the senses; thus, when the excitement of motion is produced I recollected that the mode of exorcism which was successfully adopted by Nicolai of Berlin, when haunted by similar fantasies, was a resort to the simple process of blood-letting. I accordingly made trial of it, but without the desired effect. Fearful, from the representations of my physicians, and from some of my own sensations, that the almost daily recurrence of my visions might ultimately lead to insanity, I came to the resolution of reducing my daily allowance of opium; and, confining myself, with the most rigid pertinacity, to a quantity not exceeding one third of what I had formerly taken, I became speedily sensible of a most essential change in my condition. A state of comparative health, mental and physical with calmer sleep and a more natural exercise of the in a particular organ, that organ does not vibrate with the inpression made upon it, but communicates it to another part on which a similar impression was formerly made. Nicolai states that he made his illusion a source of philosophical amusement. The spectres which haunted him came in the day time as well as the night, and frequently when he was surrounded by his friends; the ideal images mingling with the real ones, and visible only to himself. Bernard Barton, the celebrated Quaker poet, describes an illusion of this nature in a manner peculiarly striking: "I only knew thee as thou wert, A being not of earth! "I marvelled much they could not see Thou comest from above: And often to myself I said, 'How can they thus approach the dead?' "But though all these, with fondness warm, Still that expressive shade or form Was silent, as before! And yet its stillness never brought To them one hesitating thought." organs of vision, succeeded. I have made many attempts at a further reduction, but have been uniformly unsuccessful, owing to the extreme and almost unendurable agony occasioned thereby. "The peculiar creative faculty of the eye, the fearful gift of a diseased vision, still remains, but materially weakened and divested of its former terrors. My mind has recovered in some degree its shaken and suspended faculties. But happiness, the buoyant and elastic happiness of earlier days, has departed forever. Although, apparently, a practical disciple of Behmen, I am no believer in his visionary creed. Quiet is not happiness; nor can the absence of all strong and painful emotion compensate for the weary heaviness of inert existence, passionless, dreamless, changeless. The mind requires the excitement of active and changeful thought; the intellectual fountain, like the pool of Bethesda, has a more healthful influence when its deep waters are troubled. There may, indeed, be happiness in those occasional sabbaths of the soul,' when calmness, like a canopy, overshadows it, and the mind, for a brief season, eddies quietly round and round, instead of sweeping onward; but none can exist in the long and weary stagnation of feeling, the silent, the monotonous, neverending calm, broken by neither hope nor fear." 6 n w when THE PROSELYTES. [1833] THE student sat at his books. All the day he had been poring over an old and time-worn volume; and the evening found him still absorbed in its contents. It was one of that interminable series of controversial volumes, containing the theological speculations of the ancient fathers of the Church. With the patient perseverance so characteristic of his countrymen, he was endeavoring to detect truth amidst the numberless inconsistencies of heated controversy; to reconcile jarring propositions; to search out the thread of scholastic argument amidst the rant of prejudice and the sallies of passion, and the coarse vituperations of a spirit of personal bitterness, but little in accordance with the awful gravity of the question at issue. Wearied and baffled in his researches, he at length closed the volume, and rested his care-worn forehead upon his hand. "What avail," he said, "these long and painful endeavors, these midnight vigils, these weary studies, before which heart and flesh are failing? What have I gained? I have pushed my researches wide and far; my life has been one long and weary lesson; I have shut out from me the busy and beautiful world; I have |