Gipsies, who every ill can cure,
Except the ill of being poor,
Who charms ’gainst love and agues sell,
Who can in hen-roost set a spell,
Prepared by arts, to them best known,
To catch all feet except their own,
Who as to fortune can unlock it,
As easily as pick a pocket.
Churchill.
We may smile, or coldly sneer,
The while such ghostly tales we hear,—
And wonder why they were believed,
And how wise men could be deceived:—
Bathing our renovated sight
In the free gospel’s glorious light,
We marvel it was ever night!
Mrs. Hale.
This present life seems full of mysteries;
The vulgar mind, to superstition prone,
In nature’s workings fearful omens sees,
And shrinks aghast from terrors of its own
Absurd imagining. Despotic is the power
Of ignorance; and thousands live in fear
And die unnumbered times before the hour
That Heaven has set to end their being here.
The trustful, quiet, mighty thinker seeks
The beautiful and simple orderings
Of the Great Former of created things,
And God to him in guiding accents speaks.
Still, in the dealings of the Lord with men,
Some things there are beyond our human ken.
Tam saw an unco sight!
Warlocks and witches in a dance;
Nae cotillon brent new frae France,
But hornpipes, jigs, strathspeys, and reels,
Put life an mettle in their heels.
A winnock bunker in the east,
There sat auld Nick, in shape o’ beast;
A towzie tyke, black, grim, and large,
To gie them music was his charge:
He screw’d the pipes and gart them skirl,
Till roof and rafters a’ did dirl.—
Coffins stood round like open presses,
That shaw’d the dead in their last dresses;
And by some devilish cantraip slight,
Each in its cauld hand held a light,—
By which heroic Tam was able
To note upon the haly table,
A murderer’s banes in gibbet airns;
Twa span-lang, wee, unchristen’d bairns;
A thief, new cutted frae a rape,
Wi’ his last gasp his gab did gape;
Five tomahawks, wi’ bluid red-rusted;
Five scimiters, wi’ murder crusted;
A garter, which a babe had strangled;
A knife, a father’s throat had mangled,
Whom his ain son o’ life bereft,
The gray hairs yet stack to the heft;
Wi’ mair o’ horrible and awfu’,
Which ev’n to name wad be unlawfu’.
Vervain.... Enchantment.
Vervain was employed by the ancients in various kinds of divinations. They ascribed to it a thousand properties, and, among others, that of reconciling enemies. Whenever the Romans sent their heralds to offer peace or war to nations, one of them always carried a sprig of Vervain. The Druids, both in Gaul and Britain, regarded the Vervain with the same veneration as the misletoe, and offered sacrifices to the earth before they cut this plant in spring, which was a ceremony of great pomp. Though the Druids and their religion have passed away, the Vervain is still the plant of spells and enchantment. In the northern provinces of France, the shepherds gather it with ceremonies and words known only to themselves, and express its juices under certain phases of the moon. They insist that this plant enables them to cure their ailments, and to cast a spell on their daughters and cattle, by which they can make them conform to their wishes.