And as they rose Virgilio saw falling from them, as it were, a rain of rose-leaves and lilies, and every leaf as it fell faded, yet became a spirit which entered some newborn babe, and the spirit was its life.
“Sweetly hast thou sung, oh Spirit of God,” said Virgilio, as the last note was heard and the sight vanished. “The poorest devil may be saved by Love.”
The idea that a soul or spirit, human or other, can enter into a dead body and revive it is to be found in the legends of all lands, from those of ancient Egypt, as appears in that of “Anpu and Bata,” which has been nine times translated into English, down to several of these Italian tales. It is a fancy which need not be traditional or borrowed; it would occur to man as soon as the Shaman pretended to go out of his body while in a trance.
After the foregoing was written out, including the allusion to seeds found in tombs a thousand years old which grew again, and which were, of course, Roman or Etruscan, as the only kind known in Italy—I never having read of any such thing save as regards corn found in Egypt—I met with the following passage in “The Sagacity and Morality of Plants,” by Dr. J. E. Taylor:
“Seeds have been found in Celtic tumuli . . . which, after an interval of perhaps two thousand years, have germinated into plants, and similar successful experiments have been made with seeds found in ancient Roman tombs.”
As regards the original of this story, it was so imperfect, brief, and trifling that I have, as it were, well-nigh reconstructed it, and might as well claim to be its author as not, as I should have done were I an earlier Italian novelist, who without scruple appropriated popular stories with as little conscience as Robert Burns did old ballads. Bishop Percy amended them, and owned it, and all that he got thereby was much abuse and ridicule. But it is of little consequence when the legend is not offered as a mere tradition, and this is only a scrap of tradition réchauffé.
The character of Balsàbo belongs closely to the class which includes Falstaff, Panurge, Punch, Belphegor, and many other types who are “without conscience or cognition” of right or wrong, neither adapted to be banned or blessed, genially selfish, extravagantly generous, good fellows and bad Christians, yet who have ever been pre-eminently popular. But I am not aware that it ever entered into a mortal head to dream of their being reformed, any more than their cousins Manfred and Don Giovanni, for which reason I consider this tale of Balsàbo as decidedly original. Sinners we have had repentant by thousands, but this is really the only history of the conversion of Nothingarian.
Paracelsus was the first writer, following the Neo-Platonists and popular traditions, to make a mythology of elementary spirits and define their nature.
“There dwell,” he says, “under the earth semi-homines, or half-human beings, who have all temporal things which can be enjoyed and desired. They are called ‘gnomes,’ though properly the name should be sylphs or pygmies. They are not spirits, yet may be compared to them . . . between them and the devil is a great difference, because he does not die and they do, albeit they are very long-lived. And they are not spirits, because a spirit is immortal.”
This gave birth in later days to the “Entertainments” of the Comte de Gabalis, and the exquisite “Undine” of La Motte Fouqué. Of late years exact science, by its investigations into zoology and botany, has approached Paracelsus by discovering incredible developments in instinctive intelligence, as distinguished from self-conscious reason, in all that exists.