Thus are the “Spectres of the Brocken” invested with supernatural dignity, in the minds of credulity and ignorance. And no wonder, for, although the discoverer of this gigantic illusion, Mr. Jordan, might convince the Germans of the nature of this shadow, how could the credulous believe, when they beheld a _second figure_, a faint refracted spectrum of the shadow, that it was any other than the shadow king of the Brocken himself, frowning defiance on intruders.
And this reminds me of the confession of Gaffarel, in his “Unheard of Curiosities” of the seventeenth century; in his quaint chapter on the “readynge of the cloudes and whatever else is seene in the air, and of hieroglyphicks in the cloudes.”
Among other miraculous illusions, as recorded by Cardanus, “An angel once wafted on the cloudes above Millane, and great was the consternation at its appearance, until Pellicanus, a philosopher, made it plainly appear, that this angel was nothing else but the reflection of an image of stone, that was on the top of the church of Saint Godart, which was represented in the thick cloudes as in a looking-glasse.”
While I was in South Wales, in 1836, I conversed with a labourer in the Cyfarthfa works at Merthyr Tydvil, an illiterate seer, who saw, three times appearing before him, an unsubstantial tram-road; and on it a train drawn by a horse, and in this, the dead body of a man. Twice this _shadow_ emerged from the earth, and on the third ascent he looked on it, and recognized the well-known face of a comrade. The man was horror struck, but his friend lived to laugh _at him_.
When my friend, Mr. David Taylor, ascended the mountain that rises over Chamouni, on the opposite side of the valley to Mont Blanc, his magnified shadow was distinctly seen by him on the vapoury cloud that floated between these giant rocks.
In February 1837, two gentlemen, on whom I confidently trust, were standing on Calton Hill while a murky cloud hung over Edinburgh. Above this veil Arthur’s Seat peeped out like a rocky island beneath two white arches, like the lunar bows; and on the cloud itself, each gentleman saw the shadow of his companion magnified to gigantic proportions.
The aeronaut, among other glories of his ascent, may by chance be gratified by the shadow of his balloon on the face of a cumulus cloud; thus did the Duke of Brunswick, who ascended with Mrs. Graham, in August 1836. And this is the analogous recital of Prince Puckler Muskau, in his “Tutti Frutti.”