“a poet hidden
In the light of thought.”
So they say the sun is himself dark as a planet, and his atmosphere alone the source of light, through the gaps in which his common earth is seen. I am tempted—but it would be idle, and I refrain—to quote an expression or two, or a passage, from Shakspeare, exemplifying his wonderful turn for approximating to truths of which he must have been ignorant—where lines of admired and unaccountable beauty have unexpectedly acquired lucidity and appositeness through modern science. While, to make a quaint comparison, his great contemporary, Bacon, employed the lamp of his imagination to illuminate the paths to the discovery of truth, Shakspeare would, with random intuition, seize on the undiscovered truths themselves, and use them to vivify the conceptions of his fancy.
Let me now turn to explain a ghost of a more positive description—the churchyard ghost. The ghost will perhaps exclaim against so trivial a title, and one so unjust in reference to old superstition; but it will be seen he deserves no better. In popular story he had a higher office; his duty was to watch the body over which church rites had not been performed, that had been rudely inearthed after violent death. As thus—
There was a cottage in a village I could name to which a bad report attached. More than one who had slept in it had seen, at midnight, the radiant apparition of a little child standing on the hearth-stone. At length suspicion was awakened. The hearth-stone was raised, and there were found buried beneath it the remains of an infant. A story was now divulged how the last tenant and a female of the village had abruptly quitted the neighbourhood. The ghost was real and significant enough.
But here is a still better instance from a trustworthy German work, P. Kieffer’s Archives. The narrative was communicated by Herr Ehrman of Strasburg, son-in-law of the well-known writer Pfeffel, from whom he received it.
The ghost-seer was a young candidate for orders, eighteen years of age, of the name of Billing. He was known to have very excitable nerves, had already experienced sensorial illusions, and was particularly sensitive to the presence of human remains, which made him tremble and shudder in all his limbs. Pfeffel, being blind, was accustomed to take the arm of this young man, and they walked thus together in Pfeffel’s garden, near Colmar. At one spot in the garden, Pfeffel remarked that his companion’s arm gave a sudden start, as if he had received an electric shock. Being asked what was the matter, Billing replied, “Nothing.” But on their going over the same spot again, the same effect recurred. The young man being pressed to explain the cause of his disturbance, avowed that it arose from a peculiar sensation which he always experienced when in the vicinity of human remains; that it was his impression a human body must be interred there; but that, if Pfeffel would return with him at night, he should be able to speak with greater confidence. Accordingly they went together to the garden when it was dark, and as they approached the spot, Billing observed a faint light over it. At ten paces from it he stopped, and would go no farther, for he saw hovering over it, or self-supported in the air—its feet only a few inches from the ground—a luminous female figure, nearly five feet high, with the right arm folded on her breast, the left hanging by her side. When Pfeffel himself stepped forward and placed himself about where the figure appeared to be, Billing said it was now on his right hand, now on his left, now behind, now before him. When Pfeffel cut the air with his stick, it seemed as if it went through and divided a light flame, which then united again. The visit, repeated the next night, in company with some of Pfeffel’s relatives, gave the same result. They did not see any thing. Pfeffel then, unknown to the ghost-seer, had the ground dug up, when there was found at some depth, beneath a layer of quicklime, a human body in progress of decomposition. The remains were removed, and the earth carefully replaced. Three days afterwards, Billing, from whom this whole proceeding had been kept concealed, was again led to the spot by Pfeffel. He walked over it now without experiencing any unusual impression whatever.
The explanation of this mysterious phenomenon has been but recently arrived at. The discoveries of Von Reichenbach, of which I gave a sketch in the first letter, announce the principle on which it depends. Among these discoveries is the fact that the Od force makes itself visible as a dim light or waving flame to highly sensitive subjects. Such persons, in the dark, see flames issuing from the poles of magnets and crystals. Von Reichenbach eventually discovered that the Od force is distributed universally, although in varying quantities. But among the causes which excite its evolution, one of the most active is chemical decomposition. Then, happening to remember Pfeffel’s ghost story, it occurred to Von Reichenbach that what Billing had seen was possibly Od light. To test the soundness of this conjecture, Miss Reichel, a very sensitive subject, was taken at night to an extensive burying-ground near Vienna, where interments take place daily, and there are many thousand graves. The result did not disappoint Von Reichenbach’s expectations. Whithersoever Miss Reichel turned her eyes, she saw masses of flame. This appearance manifested itself most about recent graves. About very old ones it was not visible. She described the appearance as resembling less bright flame than fiery vapour, something between fog and flame. In several instances the light extended four feet in height above the ground. When Miss Reichel placed her hand on it, it seemed to her involved in a cloud of fire. When she stood in it, it came up to her throat. She expressed no alarm, being accustomed to the appearance.
The mystery has thus been entirely solved; for it is evident that the spectral character of the luminous apparition, in the two instances which I have narrated, had been supplied by the seers themselves. So the superstition has vanished; but, as usual, it veiled a truth.