waves. 66 After this I lay perfectly exhausted from terror and fatigue; I felt that my wasted strength was fast giving way, and I knew not what instant the shark would return eager for its prey. Completely overcome by exhaustion, you would scarcely believe it, I slept-yes, slept, and dreamed. It could not have been more than a minute I lay in this deep slumber, and O! what a vision swept across my brain. I thought that as I lay gazing up to heaven, a delightful strain of music filled the air, and slowly arose that brilliant group of sisters-the fair Pleiades. They rested their starry instrument" in the azure skies, and striking its shining chords, they breathed forth a strain of peace and comfort. Again and again the delightful tones breathed out, then died away "the faint exquisite music of a dream," until at last no sound could be heard, but the dying echoes that gradually expired in their own sweet music. At the same moment an increased ripple in the waters aroused me from my sleep, and I can never forget the thrill of horror that ran through every nerve, when I perceived the shark slowly moving around me in circles, as if preparing to seize upon its victim. Maddened almost to insanity, I believe that I should have made no effort at resistance, but, on raising an appealing look to Heaven to pray for strength to sustain me, I saw, glittering in all their beauty, the Pleiades. In a moment my dream rushed across my mind, and I fancied I saw Hope written in burning letters upon their brows, and, nerved by that sign, I prepared for the conflict. Silently the horrible creature revolved around me, and every instant would open its huge mouth as if to ingulf me therein. At last it came closer, and I felt its cold nose touch my face. In a moment, with all the energy of despair, I rushed upon it. The piece of timber I had under my right arm now served me as a weapon of defense, and sustaining myself by the left, I fought with the other. For about an hour I struggled with the fierce monster. I beat it about the head, trying to stun it, and every fresh dart it would make at me I would renew the attack with increased vigor. I screamed with all my might to attract any vessel that might be near, until at last it seemed as if all strength was deserting me. It was a desperate and fearful struggle between life and death, and I dared not relax one moment, for that in stant would hurl me to destruction. But even during that long and terrible scene, the Pleiades seemed ever before me, and I would murmur Pleiades, Pleiades, as if I thought that bright band would come down and succor me. At last I made a vigorous effort, and gathering up my remaining strength, I dealt the monster a blow on the head that seemed to stun it. It remained perfectly motionless for a moment, and then I saw it move gradually off, and disappear in the depths of its ocean home. I was so completely exhausted after this, that I had scarcely strength to breathe, but was compelled to make an effort to keep myself from sinking. Worn out as I was, I dared not close my eyes, but kept them fixed upon "the starry lyre of the sisters," which seemed to be echoing back my murmurings of Pleiades, Pleiades. As I lay tossing about on the deep, it appeared to me memory was gifted with ten thousand eyes, that, glancing back, brought to light every action of my past existence. Not a deed, not a thought, but sprung to life once more; every friend 1 had known, every hope I had cherished, every sorrow I had wept over, seemed actually present. Then, for the first time, did the freak that made me leave the comforts of home appear a crime; and again did the tearful voice and subdued "goodby" of my mother sound mournfully distinct, as it seemed to blend itself with the dreamy sound of the waves. While I thus pondered on the past, the lovely Pleiades gradually "sunk into their ocean bower," and "night with all her starry host" passing away, morning broke upon me. Upon looking around at the vast waste of waters that encompassed me, I espied a sail; my heart beat joyously; again I seemed endowed with supernatural energy, and I called aloud for assistance. My cries were heard, and in an instant a boat was lowered, and came wending its way through the waters. I watched it with intense anxiety. As soon as it reached me I was taken in, and on arriving on board I saw painted on its stern in large golden letters its name-"The Pleiades!" Yes! that glorious sisterhood upon whom I had anchored, as it were, my hopes, was to me the harbinger of life, the ark of safety from the storm. Do you wonder now that the glittering of the waves is to me but as a dark shad ow, and that I shudder as I gaze into that fearful depth? And do you deem it a marvel that I should turn away my glance from the waves below, to the skies above, where, pictured in brightness, glimmer that group of my vision, the Pleiades, who, on that fearful night, hung out their "golden | sign of promise" on high? Yes," the stars that gem the deep midnight" have for me more beauty than all the brightness that silvers the ocean's foam, for truly did their "footsteps pass like angels o'er the sky," when on that fearful night there was breathed to me a lesson of hope, from the bright, the beautiful Pleiades. MYSTERIOUS FACULTIES OF THE WE SOUL. E have, on two or three occasions, adverted, in the pages of THE NATIONAL, to that curious psychological problem, which has been called a sense of preexistence. Recently the attention of several writers in a London periodical, Notes and Queries, has been turned to this subject, and, without giving any opinion of our own, we condense the substance of these speculations as calculated to interest many of our readers. A distinct mention of this singular mental affection is made by Sir Walter Scott, in one of his prose fictions, where the hero of the story, unconscious of his name and lineage, revisiting his own ancestral mansion, after an absence from childhood, exclaims : "Why is it, that some scenes awaken thoughts which belong, as it were, to dreams of early and shadowy recollection, such as my old Bramin Moonshie would have ascribed to a state of previous existence? . . . How often do we find ourselves in society which we have never before met, and yet feel impressed with a mysterious and ill-defined consciousness, that neither the scene, the speakers, nor the subject, are entirely new; nay, feel as if we could anticipate that part of the conversation which has not yet taken place." That this feeling is not an uncommon one may be gathered from a late publication by Mr. Samuel Warren: "I am strongly disposed to think," he says, "that every person who has meditated upon the operations of his own mind, has occasionally, and suddenly, been startled with a notion that it possesses qualities and attributes of which he has nowhere seen any account. I do not know how to express it, but I have several times had a transient consciousness of mere ordinary incidents then occurring, having somehow or other happened before, accompanied by a vanishing idea of being able to predict the sequence. I once mentioned this to a man of powerful intellect, and he said, 'So have L.'" Sir E. B. Lytton, who has several allusions in his works to this feeling of reminiscence, describes it as "that strange kind of inner and spiritual memory, which often recalls to us places and persons we have never seen before, and which Platonists would resolve to be the unquenched and struggling consciousness of a former life." He also somewhere expresses surprise that the idea of the soul's preëxistence has not been made available for the purposes of poetry; but the distinguished writer must have forgotten, at the moment, Wordsworth's grand ode. Does not Milton, also, who had imbibed from his college friend Henry More an early bias to the study of Plato, whose philosophy nourished most of the fine spirits of that day, hint at the same opinion in those exquisite lines in Comus ? "The soul grows clotted by contagion, This, by the way, seems a favorite illustration with our elder divines, one of the greatest of whom has a noble passage, not unworthy of being placed beside the verses of Milton. (See Scott's "Christian Life," chap. iii, sec. 1.; and compare Dr. H. More's "Immortality of the Soul," book II, ch. xvi, and Sir Kenelm Digby Religio Medici," p. 91; Sir T Browne's "Works,” fol., 1686.) on 66 The testimony of Lord Lyndsay, in his description of the Valley of the Kadisha, (Letters, p. 351, ed. 1847,) is too interesting to be passed over: "We saw the River Kadisha, like a silver thread, descending from Lebanon. The whole scene bore that strange and shadowy resem blance to the wondrous landscape delineated in Kubla Khan,' that one so often feels in actual life, when the whole scene around you appears to be reacting after a long interval; your friends seated in the same juxta-position, the subjects of conversation the same, and shifting with the same dream-like ease,' that you remember at some remote and indefinite period of preexistence; you always know what will come next, and sit spell-bound, as it were, in a sort of calm expectancy." But perhaps the most remarkable narrative of the occurrence of this strange sensation is that to be found in a little "Memoir of the late William Hone," the Parodist, who appears to have been led by its experience to doubt for the first time the truth of the system of materialistic atheism, which, for thirty years of his life, he had most unfortunately adopted. The strong intimation which the incident seemed to convey to his mind of the independence of the soul upon the body gave rise to inquiries, which terminated in his becoming a convert to the truth of the Christian religion. The story, as related by himself to several of his friends, is as follows: Being called to a house in a certain street in a part of London quite new to him, he had noticed to himself, as he walked along, that he had never been there before. "I was shown," he said, "into a room to wait. On looking round, to my astonishment everything appeared perfectly familiar to me; I seemed to recognize every object. I said to myself, What is this? I was never here before, and yet I have seen all this: and, if so, there is a very peculiar knot in the shutter." He opened the shutter, and found the knot! Now, then, thought he, "here is something I cannot explain on my principles; there must be some power beyond matter." The thought then suggested, adds his biographer, never left him, till he was brought from "the horror of great darkness"—from the atheism of which he ever spoke with shuddering memories, into the glorious light of revelation. And now, what shall we say of this mysterious impression? Is it in reality from some former life that these gleams of inner memory come which are occasionally permitted to haunt our minds ? "May there not," it has been asked, "exist senses still imperfectly defined by physiological science, mysteries of the soul still undeveloped, a mockery to the learned, but of profound conviction to more delicate organizations? Or are there new diseases of the mind as of the body, the result of higher civilization, and artificial modes of life, inducing a greater delicacy and susceptibility of the nervous system? Or are we indebted to our more active and refined inquiry, and more accurate habits of mental analysis, for making us acquainted with mental phenomena, which existed before unobserved and unrecorded ?" The most plausible solution seems to be that given by a learned medical writer, the late Dr. Wigan, in his work on "The Duality of the Mind," London, 1844. After describing the sudden flash of reminiscence which accompanies the sensation in question, he adds: "All seems to be remembered, and to be now And this attracting attention for the second time; never is it supposed to be the third time. delusion occurs only when the mind has been exhausted by excitement, or is, from indisposition, or any other cause, languid, or only slightly attentive to the conversation. The persuasion of the scene being a repetition, comes on when the attention has been roused by some accidental circumstance. . . . I believe been used in the immediate preceding part of the explanation to be this: only one brain has the scene; the other brain has been asleep, or in an analogous state nearly approaching it. When the attention of both brains is roused to that the ideas have passed through the mind the topic there is the same vague consciousness before, which takes place on re-perusing the page we had read while thinking on some other subject. The ideas have passed through the mind before; and as there was not a sufficient consciousness to fix them in the mind, without a renewal, we have no means of knowing the length of time that had elapsed between the faint impression received by the single brain, and the distinct impression by the double brain. It may seem to have been many years. "The strongest example of this delusion 1 ever recollect in my own person was at the funeral of the Princess Charlotte. . . . Several disturbed nights previously, and the almost total privation of rest on the night immediately preceding it, had put my mind into a state of hysterical irritability, which was still further increased by grief, and by exhaustion for want of food. . . . I had been standing for four hours, and on taking my place beside the coffin in St. George's Chapel, was only prevented from fainting by the interest of the scene... Suddenly, after the pathetic miserere of Mozart, the music ceased, and there was an absolute silence. The coffin, placed on a kind of altar covered with black cloth, sank down so slowly through the floor, that it was only in measuring its progress by some brilliant object beyond that any motion could be perceived. I had fallen into a sort of torpid reverie, when I was recalled to consciousness by a paroxysm of grief on the part of the bereaved husband, as his eye suddenly caught the coffin sinking into its black grave formed by the inverted covering of the altar. In an instant I felt not merely an impression, but a conviction, that I had seen the whole scene before, and had heard the very words addressed to myself by Sir George Naylor. . . . Often did I discuss this matter with my talented friend, the late Dr. Gooch, who always took great interest in subjects occupying the debatable region between physics and metaphysics, but we could never devise an explanation satisfactory to either of us. I cannot but think that the theory of two brains affords a sufficient solution of this otherwise inexplicable phenomenon." It would seem to have been under similar derangement of the nervous system, unstrung by sickness, misfortune, or grief, or over-exertion, or when the feelings have been deeply stirred by some national calamity, that this peculiar sensation has usually manifested itself. At such times the very atmosphere seems fraught with some strange influence; every accustomed sound, even the ticking of a clock, unnoticed before, falls upon the ear with almost painful distinctness, and the silence which intervenes seems almost preternatural. In the case of Sir Walter Scott, recorded in that pathetic Diary of his closing life, his mind had been hopelessly impaired by his almost superhuman efforts to retrieve his ruined fortunes, and the delicacy of his mental organization, which, his biographer remarks, he had always stoically endeavored to hide, had become apparent to his friends, before that entry was made in his Diary. Indeed, the touching record of his wayward alternation of feelings, at that very period, inscribed by his own hand on a neighboring page, shows that there was every predisposition in his mind to induce a state of morbid sensibility. "We are told that Pythagoras recollected his former self in the respective persons of a herald named Ethalides, Euphorbus, the Trojan, Hermotimus, of Clazomenæ, and others, and that he even pointed out in the temple of Juno, at Argos, the shield he used when he attacked Patroclus." On the same subject we have the personal experience of a gentleman who says: from derangement of stomach; and upon one "About four years ago, I suffered severely occasion, after passing a restless and disturbed night, I came down to breakfast in the morning, experiencing a sense of general discomfort and uneasiness. I was seated at the breakfasttable with some members of my family, when suddenly the room and objects around me vanished away, and I found myself, without surprise, in the street of a foreign city. Never having been abroad, I imagined it to have been a foreign city from the peculiar character of the architecture. The street was very wide, and on either side of the roadway there was a foot pavement elevated above the street to a The houses had pointed considerable height. the street. gables, and casemented windows overhanging The roadway presented a gentle acclivity; and at the end of the street there was a road crossing it at right angles, backed by a green slope, which rose to the eminence of a hill, and was crowned by more houses, over which soared a lofty tower, either of a church or some other ecclesiastical building. As I gazed on the scene before me I was impressed with an overwhelming conviction that I had looked upon it before, and that its features were perfectly familiar to me; I even seemed almost to remember the name of the place, and while I was making an effort to do so a crowd of people appeared to be advancing in an orderly manner up the street. As it came nearer And so, too, in Hone's case, it was when it resolved itself into a quaint procession of he had been completely worn down by the persons in what we should call fancy dresses, or, perhaps, more like one of the guild festivals excitement of his extraordinary trial, that which we read of as being held in some of the he was suddenly startled by an apparent old continental cities. As the procession came recognition of an apartment which he had abreast of the spot where I was standing, I mounted on the pavement to let it go by, and certainly entered for the first time in his as it filed past me, with its banners and gay life. There is to be accounted for, how-paraphernalia flashing in the sunlight, the irreever, in his story, the curious fact that he proposed as a test to himself of the reality of the impression, the finding of a certain knot in the wood of the window-shutter, and that he actually did discover it. Another writer in the same periodical "I spent the day," he says, "which was delightful, wandering from place to place in the woods, sometimes reading, sometimes chewing the cud of sweet and bitter fancies,' idly stirred' by the succession of a thousand vague thoughts and fears, the gay strangely mingled with those of dismal melancholy: tears which seemed ready to flow unbidden; smiles which approached to those of insanity; all that wild variety of mood which solitude engenders." says: "There are many mansions' in the kingdom of God. Is it not then very possible that previously to this life the human soul has passed through many mansions, that is, many different phases of existence, and that it is destined to pass through many more before it arrives at its final rest? Surely if we could establish as true the idea of a preexistence, we should gain an additional argument, if such were wanting, in proof of an immortality to come. sistible conviction again came over me that I had seen this same procession before, and in the very street through which it was now passing. Again I almost recollected the name of the concourse and its occasion; but while endeavoring to stimulate my memory to perform its functions, the effort dispelled the vision, and I found myself, as before, seated at my breakfasttable, cup in hand. My exclamation of astonishment attracted the notice of one of the members of my family, who inquired what I had been staring at.' Upon my relating what I have imperfectly described, some surprise was manifested, as the vision, which appeared to me to embrace a period of considerable duration, must have been almost instantaneous. The city, with its landscape, is indelibly fixed in my memory, but the sense of previous familiarity with it has never again been renewed. TO A STEP-CHILD. The spirit of man within him' is, indeed, a mystery; and those who have witnessed the progress of a case of catalepsy cannot but have been impressed with the conviction, that there are dormant faculties belonging to the human mind, which, like the rudimentary wings said to be contained within the skin of a caterpillar, are only to be developed in a higher sphere of being. It was long before I could find persons who had experienced what I have so often done in this way. It has many times happened to me, not like the feeling of pre-existence noticed by Lytton and Scott, but as if I had myself gone through precisely the same train of thought before, or as having spoken the same things, and had others join in the conversation and say the same, as had happened at some indistinct period before. I have found a few, but very few persons who testified that they had It experienced the same curious sensation. never occurred to me as in any way implying or connected with pre-existence, but it is sufficiently strange and unaccountable to have a strong vivid recollection come upon us that we have thought and spoken, and that others have spoken with us, precisely in the same order and connection as at the time present. This feeling I have had very frequently, but of course it has been oftenest with reference to trains of thought alone. I may add, that not unfrequently it has happened to me in a dream, to feel that I had dreamed exactly the same before." "I saw myself, as in a vision, transported to that happy time and that charming place where my heart, reveling in happiness, tastes inexpressible delights without even dreaming of voluptuous pleasures. I do not remember ever being more forcibly or more entirely transported into the future than at this time. And the most remarkable circumstance was, that when this reverie was realized, I found everything just If ever the dream of as I had imagined it to be. a man just awakened from sleep may have had the air of a prophetic vision, this reverie did most assuredly." He afterward relates the realization of his day-dream, at a fête champétre in the company of Madame de Warens, at a place which he had not previously seen: "The mental state in which I found myself in all that we said or did that day, as well as all the objects that attracted my attention, vividly recalled the circumstances of the waking dream which I had at Annecy seven or eight. years before. The similarities were so striking that, in thinking of them, I was moved even to tears." Now, if Rousseau, on the second of these occasions, had forgotten the previous one, saving a faint remembrance of the ideas which he then conceived, it is evident that this would have been a case of the kind under consideration. ter TO A STEP-CHILD. Round thy brow, Thy blue eyes, with their soft and liquid luster, E'en the strange sadness on thine infant features, Are hers whose mournful eyes seem sadly bend- On her lost dove. Another writer expresses a wish that a more appropriate term were found to designate the feeling in question. He would call it "mysterious memory," rather than THOU art not mine-the golden locks that clus"the sense of pre-existence." Many have experienced it who are unwilling and unable to conceive that the present is merely 66 Nature never the repetition of the past. repeats herself," is an axiom in natural philosophy. "The sense of prescience" would, perhaps, be nearer the truth. Some of the cases, as that of Hone, are scarcely to be explained otherwise than as cases of fore-knowledge. That, under certain conditions, the human mind is capable of foreseeing the future, more or less distinctly, is hardly to be questioned. May we not suppose that in dreams or waking reveries we sometimes anticipate what will befall us, and that this impression, forgotten in the interval, is revived by the actual occurrence of the event fore Thou art not mine-upon thy sweet lip lingers In the deep eyes so trustfully upraising Not mine, yet dear to me, fair, fragrant blossom |