The Philosophy of Mystery. Walter Cooper Dendy
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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?
As we see the stars from the deep well, so may such spirits look into futurity from the dark abyss of dissolution. In some cases of little children, I have learned that this unearthly feeling has caused them to anticipate their dying. How pathetically does John Evelyn, in his Diary, allude to the anticipation of his little boy—“an angel in body and in mind, who died of a quartan ague, in his fifth year. The day before he died, he called to me and told me that, for all I loved him so dearly, I should give my house, lands, and all my fine things, to his brother.”
The dying seem indeed themselves to feel that they are scarcely of this world. Holcroft, a short time before his death, hearing his children on the stairs, said to his wife, “Are those your children, Louisa?”—as if he were already in another existence. As if the human mind itself were perusing the celestial volume of the recording angel—the awful book of fate.
When the Northern Indian is stretched on the torture, even amidst his agonies, an inspired combination of belief and hope presents him with vivid pictures of the blessed regions of the Kitchi Manitou. The faithful Mussulman, in the agonies of death, feels assured that his enchanted sight is blessed by the beautiful houris in Mahomet’s paradise. The Runic warriors also, as the Icelandic chronicles record in their epitaphs, when mortally wounded in battle, “fall, laugh, and expire;” and in this expiration, like the dying warriors of Homer, predict the fate of their enemies.
As the venom of the serpent curdled the blood in the veins of Regner Lodbrog, the Danish king, he exclaimed with ecstasy—“What new joys arise within me! I am dying! I hear Odin’s voice; the gates of his palace are already opened, and half-naked maidens advance to meet me. A blue scarf heightens the dazzling whiteness of their bosoms; they approach and present me with the soul-exhilarating beverage in the bloody skulls of my enemies.”
Ev. In that awful moment, when the spirit is
“Soon from his cell of clay
To burst a seraph in the blaze of day,”
the mind is prone to yield to those feelings which it might perhaps in the turmoil of the busy world and at another period deem superstition. There is something in the approach of death of so holy and so solemn a nature, something so unlike life in the feeling of the dying, that in this transition, although we cannot compass the mystery, some vision of another world may steal over the retiring spirit, imparting to it a proof of its immortality. I do not fear to yield for once my approval of this devout passage of Sir Thomas Brown:—“It is observed that men sometimes upon the hour of their departure do speak and reason above themselves, for then the soul begins to be freed from the ligaments of the body, and to discourse in a strain above mortality.” It is on the verge of eternity, and the laws and principles of vitality may be already repealed by the Being who conferred them.—The arguments, then, regarding the phenomena of life may fail, when life has all but ceased.
With this admission, I may counsel Astrophel as to the danger of adducing heathen history or fiction in proof of this solemn question.
Cast. And yet Shakspere, for one, with a poet’s license, brings before us, as you do, the dying hour, as the cause of prophetic vision. John of Gaunt, on his death-bed, mutters—
“Methinks I am a prophet new inspired,
And thus expiring do foretell of him,”
and then predicts the fate of Richard.
And remember, the dying Hotspur says—
——“now could I prophecy,
But that the icy hand of death,” &c.
Ev. Well, I will not controvert your creed, Astrophel; rather let me illustrate some of your apparent mysteries by simple analogy.
As in these extreme moments of life, so in the hour of extreme danger, when an awful fate is impending, and the world and our sacred friendships are about to be lost to us, a vision of our absent friends will pass before us with all the light of reality. We read in the writings of Dr. Conolly of a person who, in danger of being swamped on the Eddystone rock, saw the phantoms of his family passing distinctly before him; and these are the words of the English Opium-Eater:—“I was once told by a near relative of mine that, having in her childhood fallen into a river, and being on the very verge of death but for the critical assistance which reached her, she saw in a moment her whole life in its minutest incidents arrayed before her simultaneously, as in a mirror, and she had a faculty developed as suddenly for comprehending the whole and every part.”
Now, although the coming on of death is often attended by that slight delirium indicated by the babbling of green fields, and the playing with flowers, and the picking of the bedclothes, and the smiling on the fingers’ ends, yet in others some oppressive or morbid cause of insanity may be removed by the moribund condition. In the words of Aretæus—“the system has thrown off many of its impurities, and the soul, left naked, was free to exercise such energies as it still possessed.”
I will glance in illustration at these interesting cases:—from Zimmerman, of an insane woman of Zurich, who, “a few hours before her death, became perfectly sensible and wonderfully eloquent;”—from Dr. Perceval, of a female idiot, who, as she was dying of consumption, evinced the highest powers of intellect;—from Dr. Marshall, of the maniac, who became completely rational some hours previous to his dissolution;—and from Dr. Hancock, of the Quaker, who, from the condition of a drivelling idiot, became shortly before his death so completely rational, as to call his family together, and, as his spirit was passing from him, bestow on them with pathetic solemnity his last benediction.
Thus your impressive records are clearly explained by pathology; and, perhaps unconscious of this, Mrs. Opie has a fine illustration in her “Father and Daughter:”—the mind of the maniac parent being illumined before his death by a beam of reason.
But in the languid brain of an idiot excitement may even produce rationality.
Samuel Tuke tells us of a domestic servant, who lapsed into a state of complete idiocy. Some time after, she fell into typhus fever, and as this progressed, there was a real development of mental power. At that stage when delirium lighted up the minds of others, she was rational, because the excitement merely brought up the nervous energy to its proper point. As the fever abated, however, she sunk into her idiot apathy, and thus continued until she died. It was but the transient gleam of reason.
PHANTASY FROM CEREBRAL CONGESTION.—OPIUM.