“——Deeds are done on earth, Which have their punishment ere the earth closes Upon the perpetrators. Be it the working Of the remorse-stained fancy, or the vision Distinct and real of unearthly being: All ages witness that, beside the couch Of the fell homicide, oft stalks the ghost Of him he slew, or shows his shadowy wound.”
It is this utter humiliation of the spirit, and the conviction of our polluted nature, that rankle so intensely in the wounded heart; and thence the repentant sinner feels so deeply that awful truth, that there is a Being infinitely more pure and godlike than himself.
EV. A very fertile source of spectral illusion is the devotion to peculiar studies and deep reflection on interesting subjects. Mons. Esquirol records the hallucination of a lady, who had been reading a terrific account of the execution of a criminal. Ever after, in all her waking hours, and in every place, she saw above her left eye the phantom of a bloody head, wrapped in black crape,—a thing so horrible to her, that she repeatedly attempted the commission of suicide. And of another lady, who had dipped so deeply into a history of witches, that she became convinced of her having, like Tam O’Shanter’s lady of the “cutty sark,” been initiated into their mysteries, and officiated at their “sabbath” ceremonies.
Monsieur Andral, in his youth, saw in La Pitié the putrid body of a child covered with _larvæ_, and during the next morning, the spectre of this corpse lying on his table was as perfect as reality.
We have known mathematicians whose ghosts even appeared in the shape of coloured circles and squares, and Justus Martyr was haunted by the phantoms of flowers. Nay, our own Sir Joshua, after he had been painting portraits, sometimes believed the trees, and flowers, and posts to be men and women.
I knew myself a bombardier, whose brain had been wounded in a battle. To this man a post was an enemy, and he would, when a sudden frenzy came on him, attack it in the street with his cane, and not leave it until he believed that his foeman was beaten or lay prostrate at his feet.
Intense feeling, especially if combined with apprehension, often raises a phantom. The unhappy Sir R—— C——, on being summoned to attend the Princess Charlotte of Wales, saw her form robed in white distinctly glide along before him as he sat in his carriage: a parallel, nay, an _explanation_, to the interesting stories of Astrophel.