A friend of mine, Mr. Charles Kirkpatrick Sharpe, has some coins that were found exactly in the same manner. The child of a Mr. Christison, in whose house his father was lodging, in the year 1781, dreamed that there was a treasure hid in the cellar. Her father had no faith in the dream; but Mr. Sharpe had the curiosity to have the place dug up, and a copper pot was found, full of coins.
A very singular circumstance was related to me by Mr. J——, as having occurred not long since to himself. A tonic had been prescribed to him by his physician, for some slight derangement of the system, and as there was no good chemist in the village he inhabited, he was in the habit of walking to a town about five miles off, to get the bottle filled as occasion required. One night, that he had been to M—— for this purpose, and had obtained his last supply, for he was now recovered, and about to discontinue the medicine, a voice seemed to warn him that some great danger was impending, his life was in jeopardy; then he heard, but not with his outward ear, a beautiful prayer. “It was not myself that prayed,” he said, “the prayer was far beyond anything I am capable of composing—it spoke of me in the third person, always as he; and supplicated that for the sake of my widowed mother this calamity might be averted. My father had been dead some months. I was sensible of all this, yet I can not say whether I was asleep or awake. When I rose in the morning, the whole was present to my mind, although I had slept soundly in the interval; I felt, however, as if there was some mitigation of the calamity, though what the danger was with which I was threatened, I had no notion. When I was dressed, I prepared to take my medicine, but on lifting the bottle, I fancied that the color was not the same as usual. I looked again, and hesitated, and finally, instead of taking two tablespoonfuls, which was my accustomed dose, I took but one. Fortunate it was that I did so; the apothecary had made a mistake; the drug was poison; I was seized with a violent vomiting, and other alarming symptoms, from which I was with difficulty recovered. Had I taken the two spoonfuls, I should, probably, not have survived to tell the tale.”
The manner in which I happened to obtain these particulars is not uninteresting. I was spending the evening with Mr. Wordsworth, at Ridal, when he mentioned to me that a stranger, who had called on him that morning, had quoted two lines from his poem of “Laodamia,” which, he said, to him had a peculiar interest. They were these:—
“The invisible world with thee hath sympathized;
Be thy affections raised and solemnized.”
“I do not know what he alludes to,” said Mr. Wordsworth; “but he gave me to understand that these lines had a deep meaning for him, and that he had himself been the subject of such a sympathy.”
Upon this, I sought the stranger, whose address the poet gave me, and thus learned the above particulars from himself. His very natural persuasion was, that the interceding spirit was his father. He described the prayer as one of earnest anguish.
One of the most remarkable instances of warning that has come to my knowledge, is that of Mr. M——, of Kingsborough. This gentleman, being on a voyage to America, dreamed, one night, that a little old man came into his cabin and said, “Get up! Your life is in danger!” Upon which, Mr. M—— awoke; but considering it to be only a dream, he soon composed himself to sleep again. The dream, however, if such it were, recurred, and the old man urged him still more strongly to get up directly; but he still persuaded himself it was only a dream; and after listening a few minutes, and hearing nothing to alarm him, he turned round and addressed himself once more to sleep. But now the old man appeared again, and angrily bade him rise instantly, and take his gun and ammunition with him, for he had not a moment to lose. The injunction was now so distinct that Mr. M—— felt he could no longer resist it; so he hastily dressed himself, took his gun, and ascended to the deck, where he had scarcely arrived, when the ship struck on a rock, which he and several others contrived to reach. The place, however, was uninhabited, and but for his gun, they would never have been able to provide themselves with food till a vessel arrived to their relief.
Now these can scarcely be looked upon as instances of clear-seeing, or of second-sight in sleep, which, in Denmark, is called first-seeing, I believe; for in neither case did the sleeper perceive the danger, much less the nature of it. If, therefore, we refuse to attribute them to some external protecting influence, they resolve themselves into cases of vague presentiment; but it must then be admitted that the mode of the manifestation is very extraordinary; so extraordinary, indeed, that we fall into fully as great a difficulty as that offered by the supposition of a guardian spirit.
An American clergyman told me that an old woman, with whom he was acquainted, who had two sons, heard a voice say to her in the night, “John’s dead!” This was her eldest son. Shortly afterward, the news of his death arriving, she said to the person who communicated the intelligence to her, “If John’s dead, then I know that David is dead, too, for the same voice has since told me so;” and the event proved that the information, whence ever it came, was correct.