"It was a vision. In the drowsy gloom,
The dull of midnight, at her couch's foot
Lorenzo stood, and wept: the forest tomb
Had marr'd his glossy hair, which once could shoot
Lustre into the sun, and put cold doom
Upon his lips, and taken the soft lute
From his lorn voice, and past his loamed ears
Had made a miry channel for his tears.
Strange sound it was, when the pale shadow spoke;
For there was striving in its piteous tongue,
To speak as when on earth it was awake,
And Isabella on its music hung:
Languor there was in it, and tremulous shake,
As in a palsied Druid's harp unstrung;
And through it moaned a ghostly under-song,
Like hoarse night-gusts sepulchral briers among.
Its eyes, though wild, were still all dewy bright
With love, and kept all phantom fear aloof
From the poor girl by magic of their light,
The while it did unthread the horrid woof
Of the late darken'd time—the murd'rous spite
Of pride and avarice—the dark pine roof
In the forest—and the sodden turfed dell,
When, without any word, from stabs it fell.
Saying moreover, "Isabel, my sweet!
Red whortle-berries droop above my head,
And a large flint-stone weighs upon my feet;
Around me beeches and high chesnuts shed
Their leaves and prickly nuts; a sheep-fold bleat
Comes from beyond the river to my bed:
Go shed one tear upon my heather-bloom,
And it shall comfort me within the tomb.
"I am a shadow now, alas! alas!
Upon the skirts of human nature dwelling
Alone: I chaunt alone the holy mass,
While little sounds of life are round me knelling,
And glossy bees at noon do fieldward pass,
And many a chapel bell the hour is telling,
Paining me through: those sounds grow strange to me,
And thou art distant in humanity."
Some of these apparitions have, in all probability, been illusions caused by an object indistinctly seen in the pale moonlight, or by an accidental arrangement of the furniture of the apartment, transformed by an imagination devoted to the subject of its own sorrows, or influenced by a vivid dream, into the idea at the moment most prominent in the mind.
The influence of remorse, or of those terrible emotions which accrue to the murderer on the perpetration of the foul deed, in causing hallucinations, is well known.
The ghost of Banquo (Macbeth, Act III, Scene 3) is a type of many wondrous histories:—
"Prythee, see there! Behold! Look! Lo!—How say you?
Why what can I? If thou canst nod, speak too.
If charnel-houses, and our graves, must send
Those that we bury, back, our monuments
Shall be the maws of kites."