“You may,” was his reply, “and I will pay the printer.”
“Shall I add anything to it; that is, what I said to the Trustees, and so forth?”
“Yes, tell the whole! Write what you please!”
With this most unexpected license of unrestricted liberty, I commenced re-writing and preparing a tract for the press. But before twenty-four hours had elapsed since this liberty license was granted to my hitherto prison-bound intellect, the vision of a big book began to dawn upon my mind, accompanied with the most delightful feelings of satisfaction with my undertaking. And the next time the Doctor called, I told him that it seemed to me that I must write a book—a big book—and “that is the worst of it,” said I, “I don’t want a large book, but I don’t see how I can cut it down, and do it justice. I want to lay two train of cars,” said I, “across this continent—the Christian and the Calvinistic. Then I want to sort out all the good and evil found in our family institutions, our Church and State institutions, and our laws, and all other departments of trades and professions, &c., and then come on with my two train of cars, and gather up this scattered freight, putting the evil into the Calvinistic train, and the good into the Christian train, and then engineer them both on to their respective terminus. These thoughts are all new and original with me, having never thought of such a thing, until this sort of mental vision came before my mind. What shall I do, Doctor?”
“Write it out just as you see it.”
He then furnished me with paper and gave directions to the attendants to let no one disturb me, and let me do just as I pleased. And I commenced writing out this mental vision; and in six week’s time I penciled the substance of “The Great Drama,” which, when written out for the press, covers two thousand five hundred pages! Can I not truly say my train of thought was engineered by the “Lightning Express?” This was the kind of inspiration under which my book was thought out and written. I had no books to aid me, but Webster’s large Dictionary and the Bible. It came wholly through my own reason and intellect, quickened into unusual activity by some spiritual influence, as it seemed to me. The production is a remarkable one, as well as the inditing of it a very singular phenomenon.
The estimation in which the book is held by that class in that Asylum who are “spirit mediums,” and whose only knowledge of its contents they wholly derive from their clairvoyant powers of reading it, without the aid of their natural vision, it may amuse a class of my readers to know. It was a fact the attendants told me of, that my book and its contents, was made a very common topic of remark in almost every ward in the house; while all this time, I was closeted alone in my room writing it, and they never saw me or my book. I would often be greatly amused by the remarks they made about it, as they were reported to me by witnesses who heard them. Such as these: “I have read Mrs. Packard’s book through, and it is the most amusing thing I ever read.” “Calvinism is dead—dead as a herring.” “Mrs. Packard drives her own team, and she drives it beautifully, too.” “The Packard books are all over the world, Norway is full of them. They perfectly devour the Packard books in Norway.” “Mrs. Packard finds a great deal of fault with the Laws and the Government, and she has reason to.” “She defends a higher and better law than our government has, and she’ll be in Congress one of these days, helping to make new laws!”
If this prophetess had said that woman’s influence would be felt in Congress, giving character to the laws, I might have said I believed she had uttered a true prophecy.
One very intelligent patient, who was a companion of mine, and had read portions of my book, came to my room one morning with some verses which she had penciled the night previous, by moonlight, on the fly-leaf of her Bible, which she requested me to read, and judge if they were not appropriate to the character of my book. She said she had been so impressed with the thought that she must get up and write something, that she could not compose herself to sleep until she had done so; when she wrote these verses, but could not tell a word she had written the next morning, except the first line. I here give her opinions of the book in her own poetic language, as she presented them to me.
LINES SUGGESTED BY THE PERUSAL OF THE GREAT DRAMA.