EV. And you believe it. Well, for a moment I grant its truth; but it is the reverse in Scotland; the vision is almost ever cheerless, and prophetic of woe. “Does the sight come gloomy o’er your spirit?” asks Mac Aulay. “As dark as the shadow of the moon when she is darkened in her course in heaven, and prophets foretell of future times.” And the anathema of Roderich Dhu’s prophet Brian is dark and gloomy as the legend of his mysterious birth, or its prototype, the impure fable of Atys, and the loves of Jupiter and Sangaris.
CAST. If I am the sylph to charm this moody gentleman from his reveries, I will warn him in the words of a canzonet, even of the 17th century:
“Yet, rash astrologer, refrain; Too dearly would be won The prescience of another’s pain, If purchased by thine own.”
And I will tell him what Collins writes on the perils of the seer, in his “Ode on Highland Superstition,”—
“How they whose sight such dreary dreams engross, With their own vision oft astonished droop, When o’er the wat’ry strath or quaggy moss They see the gliding ghosts embodied troop.— They know what spirit brews the stormful day, And, heartless, oft like moody madness stare To see the phantom train their secret work prepare.”
He listens not to me. Nay, then, I will try the virtue of a _spell_ that has oft shed a ray of light over the dark hour of the ghost-seer. I will whisper music in thine ear, Astrophel. The fiend of Saul was chased away by the harp of David; the gloomy shadows of Allan Mac Aulay were brightened by the melody of Annot Lyle; and the illusion of Philip of Spain, that he was dead and in his grave, was dispelled by the exquisite lute of the Rose of the Alhambra.
ASTR. My thanks, fair Castaly; yet wherefore should I claim your syren spells. _My_ visions are delightful as the inspiration of the improvisatore, and carry not the penalty of the monomaniac. But say, if there _be_ (in vulgar words) a crack in this cranium of mine, may not this crack, as saith the learned Samuel Parr, “_let in the light_?”
If prophetic visions in the _early ages_ came over the dying, why not in ours?
The last solemn speech of Jacob was an inspired prophecy of the miraculous advent:—“The sceptre shall not depart from Judah, nor a lawgiver from between his feet, until Shiloh come, and to him shall the gathering of the people be.” And is it profanation to ask, why may not the departing spirit of holiness, even now, prophecy to _us_?