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_.