The Philosophy of Mystery. Walter Cooper Dendy
the “Lay,” the “Lady of the Lake,” and “Marmion.” It may excite the jealousy of a classic, but the ghosts and heroes of Ossian, as very acute critics decide, are cast in a finer mould than the gods of Homer.
You smile at me, most learned clerks of Oxenford, yet I believe the critics are correct. When I was prowling in the king’s private library, in Paris, M. Barbier placed in my hands two of the most precious tomes, the folio “Evangelistarium,” or prayer-book of Charlemagne, and the 4to. edition of Ossian. The one is sanctified by its subject, and rich beyond compare in illuminations of gold and colours, and priceless in the eyes of the bibliomaniac. The other was the favourite book of Napoleon.
Fancy that you hear him in the solitude of St. Cloud, poring in deep admiration over passages like this:
“Fingal drew his sword, the blade of dark-brown Luno. The gleaming path of the steel winds through the gloomy ghost. The form fell shapeless into air, like a column of smoke as it rises from the half-extinguished furnace. The spirit of Loda shrieked, as, rolled into himself, he rose on the wind. Inistore shook at the sound. The waves heard it on the deep, and stopped in their course with fear.”
And yet these beauties, like the pictures of Turner, are looked upon with a smile of wondering pity or of scorn, simply because these home-keeping critics have never scaled the mountain, or breasted the storm for its wild and purple glory.
Among the mountains of Wales it was my fortune to light on many a wild spot, where the poetry of nature fell like the sun-light on the heart of the peasant. In the beautiful vale of Neath there is the tiny hamlet of Pont-Neath-Vechan. I shall ever remember how fair and beautiful it seemed as I descended from the mountain rocks of Pen y Craig, the loftiest of the Alps of Glamorgan, which inclose Ystrad-Vodwg, the “village of the green valley.” Around its humble cottages is spread the most romantic scenery of Brecknockshire. The tributaries of its rolling river there blend their waters—those torrent streams which Drayton has impersonated in the Polyolbion, as
“Her handmaids Meltè sweet, clear Hepstè, and Tragath.”
On the Meltè is the wondrous cavern of Porth-Mawr, through which, in Stygian darkness, flows this Acherontic river. And on the clear Hepstè is that glittering waterfall which in the midst of leafy woods and bosky glens, throws itself, like a miniature Niagara, from the rock, forming an arch of crystal, beneath which the traveller and the peasant cross the river’s bed on the moss-green and slippery limestone. Oh! for the pencil of a Salvator, the pen of Torquato, to picture the wild vision which was before my eyes when I sought shelter beneath this crystal canopy from the deluge of a thunder-cloud. The lightning flash gleamed through the waterfall, forming a prismatic rainbow of transcendent beauty, while the deep peal swept through the echoing dingles, and the crimson-spotted trout leaped in sportive summersaults over the water-ousel that was walking quietly on the gravel, deep in the water.
In this wilderness of nature, no wonder that legends should prevail: that fairies are seen sporting in the Hepstè cascades, and that in the dark cavern of Cwm-Rhyd y Rhesg, the ghosts of headless ladies so often affright the romantic girls of these wild valleys. No wonder that they believe the giant Idris, enthroned on his mountain chair, shook the three pebbles from his shoe into that pool which bears the name of the Lake of Three Grains; or that the shrieks of Prince Idwal are to this day heard by the peasants of Snowdonia, amid the storm which bursts over the purple crag of the Twll-dhu, and thunder-clouds cast a deeper and a darker shade over the black water of Lyn Idwal. Nay, I myself may confess, that as I have stood on the peaks of Y Wyddfa, while the white and crimson clouds rolled beneath me in fleecy masses, whirling around the cone of Snowdon, I have for a moment believed that I was something more than earthly. And when enveloped in the mysterious cloud which rests on the head of Mount Pilate in Lucern, I gave half my faith to the legend of the guide, that storm and human trouble, and the perils of flocks in the vicinity of its triple peak, were the result of the self-immersion of Pontius Pilate in its lake, an act of remorse at his impious adjudication. This unhallowed water was regarded with dismay, and not a pebble might be cast to make a ripple on its surface and disturb the quiet of the traitor. But, lo! in the sixteenth century the spell was proved to be a fable by an assemblage of bold Switzers, who hurled rocks into the lake, and swam across its water without the slightest indication of displeasure from this kelpie of the Brundeln Alp.
Ev. The truth is sweeter on your lips than fiction, Castaly. Whisper again in the ear of Astrophel the penalties entailed on the indulgence of second sight. Dr. Abercrombie knew a gentleman who could, by his will, call up spirits, and seers have assured me that the sight is to a certain degree voluntary:—by fixing the attention on a subject during the dark hour, the power of divination may be increased, but it cannot be controlled. But those who indulge in those illusions are often driven on to a degree of frenzy equal to the agonizing penalty of Frankenstein; even as the witch of Endor trembled when she raised before Saul the spirit of Samuel, or the Iberian princess Pyrene, who, like Sin, fled from the child-serpent which was born from her dalliance with Hercules.
The effort of the seers, nay, the mysterious ordeal to which they submit themselves, are often so painful, that they gaze with strained eyeballs, and fainting occurs as the vision appears. When the dark hour is o’er, they will exclaim with Mac Aulay, “Thank God, the mist hath passed from my spirit!” Indeed, Sir Walter Scott observed in those who presumed to this faculty, “shades of mental aberration which caused him to feel alarmed for those who assumed the sight.” Archibald, Duke of Argyle, was a seer, and it is written that he was haunted by blue phantoms, the origin, I believe, of our epithet for melancholy—“blue devils.”
At the foot of yonder purple mountains in Morgany, once lived Colonel Bowen, a doer of evil works, whose spectral visitations fill so many pages of Baxter’s “Essay on the Reality of Apparitions.” This deep historian of the realm of shadows tells that the wizard was worn down by the phantoms of his evil conscience; that he imprisoned himself and his boy, who was, I presume, a sort of famulus, in a small castle; that he walked and talked of diablerie, and I know not what miseries, in his sleep.
I have myself known those who see spectres when they shut their eyes, before an attack of delirium, which vanish on the re-admission of light; and in imaginative minds, under peculiar conditions, intense reading may so shut out the real world, that an effort is required to re-establish vision. In Polydori’s “Vampyre” it is recorded that they had been reading phantasmagoria, and ghost stories in Germany, thereby highly exciting the sensitive mind of Percy Bysshe Shelley. Anon, on Byron’s reading some lines of Christabel, Shelley ran from the room, and was found leaning on a mantel-piece bedewed with cold and clammy perspiration; and it is enough to read of the gloom which marked the minds of those geister-sehers, the proselytes of Swedenborg (among whom he ranked the King of Prussia), to reclaim all the converts to his strange religion.
Astr. There is a bright side, Evelyn. In Germany, those children which are born on a Sunday are termed “Sontag’s kind,” and are believed to be endowed with the faculty of seeing spirits; these are gifted with a life of happiness.
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