It must not be forgotten that the human eye has, beyond question, often a power which far transcends the ordinary purposes of sight, and approaches the boundaries of magic. There is probably no one who cannot recall scenes in which the soothing and cheering expression of gentle eyes has acted like healing balm on wounded hearts; or others, in which glances of fury and hatred have caused genuine terror and frightened the conscience. History records a number of instances, from the glance of the Saviour, which made Peter go out and weep bitterly, to the piercing eye of a well-known English judge, which made criminals of every rank in society feel as if their very hearts lay open to the divining eye of a master. This peculiar and almost irresistible power of the eye has not inaptly been traced back to the gorgon head of antiquity—a frightful image from Hades with a dread glance of the eye, as it is called by Homer (Il. viii. 349; Odyss. xi. 633). The same fearful expression, chilling the blood and almost arresting the beating of the heart, is frequently mentioned in modern accounts of visions. Thus the Demon of Tedworth recorded by Glanvil ("Sadd. Triumph." 4th ed. p. 270), consisted of the vague outlines of a human face, in which only two bright, piercing eyes could be distinguished. In other cases, a faint vapor, barely recalling a human shape, arises before the beholder, and above it are seen the same terrible eyes
"Sent from the palace of Ais by fearful Persephoneia."
Magic divination in point of time includes the class of generally very vague and indefinite perceptions, which we call presentiments. These are, unfortunately, so universally mixed up with impressions produced after the occurrence—vaticinium post eventum—that their value as interesting phenomena of magic is seriously impaired. There remains, however, in a number of cases, enough that is free from all spurious admixture, to admit of being examined seriously. The ancients not only believed in this kind of foresight, but ascribed it with Pythagoras to revelations made by friendly spirits; in Holy Writ it rises almost invariably, under direct inspiration from on high, to genuine prophecy. It reveals not only the fate of the seer, but also that of others, and even of whole nations; the details vary, of course, according to the prevailing spirit of the times.
When Narses was ruling over Italy, a young shepherd in the service of Valerianus, a lawyer, was seized by the plague and fell into syncope. He recovered for a time, and then declared that he had been carried to heaven, where he had heard the names of all who in his master's house should die of the plague, adding that Valerianus himself would escape. After his death everything occurred as he had predicted. An English minister, Mr. Dodd, one night felt an irresistible impulse to visit a friend of his who lived at some distance. He walked to his house, found the family asleep, but the father still awake and ready to open the door to his late visitor. The latter, very much embarrassed, thought it best to state the matter candidly, and confessed that he came for no ostensible purpose, and really did not know himself what made him do so. "But God knew it," was the answer, "for here is the rope with which I was just about to hang myself." It may well be presumed that the Rev. Mr. Dodd had some apprehensions of the state of mind of his friend; but that he should have felt prompted to call upon him just at that hour, was certainly not a mere accident.
The family of the great Goethe was singularly endowed with this power of presentiment. The poet's grandfather predicted both a great conflagration and the unexpected arrival of the German Emperor, and a dream informed him beforehand of his election as alderman and then as mayor of his native city. His mother's sister saw hidden things in her dreams. His grandmother once entered her daughter's chamber long after midnight in a state of great and painful excitement; she had heard in her own room a noise like the rustling of papers, and then deep sighs, and after a while a cold breath had struck her. Some time after this event a stranger was announced, and when he appeared before her holding a crumbled paper in his hand, she had barely strength enough to keep from fainting. When she recovered, her visitor stated that in the night of her vision a dear friend of hers, lying on his deathbed, had asked for paper in order to impart to her an important secret; before he could write, however, he had been seized by the death-struggle, and after crumpling up the paper and uttering two deep sighs he had expired. An indistinct scrawl was all that could be seen; still the stranger had thought it best to bring the paper. The secret concerned his now orphaned child, a girl whom Goethe's grandparents thereupon took home and cared for affectionately (Goethe's Briefwechsel, 3d ed., II. p. 268).
Bourrienne tells us in his Mémoires several instances of remarkable forebodings on the part of Napoleon's first wife, Josephine. Her mind was probably, by her education and the peculiar surroundings in which she passed her childhood, predisposed to receive vivid impressions of this kind, and to observe them with great care and deep interest. Thus she almost invariably predicted the failure of such of her husband's enterprises as proved unsuccessful. After Bonaparte had moved into the Tuileries on the 18th Brumaire, she saw, while sitting in the room of poor Marie Antoinette, the shadow of the unfortunate queen rise from the floor, pass gently through the apartment, and vanish through the window. She fainted, and from that day predicted her own sad fate. On another occasion the spirit of her first husband, Beauharnais, appeared before her with a gesture of solemn warning; she immediately turned to Napoleon, exclaiming: "Awake, awake, you are threatened by a great danger!" There seemed to be, for some days, no ground for apprehension, but so strong were her fears that she secretly sent for the minister of police and entreated him to take special measures for the safety of the First Consul. At eight o'clock of the evening of the same day the latter left the Tuileries on his way to the opera; a terrible explosion was heard in the Rue St. Nicaise, where conspirators attempted to blow up the dictator, and he narrowly escaped with his life. Josephine at once hastened to his side, and after having most tenderly cared for the wounded, embraced Napoleon in public with tears streaming down her face, and implored him hereafter to listen more attentively to her warnings. Napoleon, however, though superstitious enough firmly to believe in what he called his "star," and even to see it shining in the heavens when no one else beheld it, never would admit the value of his wife's forebodings.
Presentiments of this kind are most frequently felt before death, and it is now almost universally believed that the impending dissolution of the body relieves the spirit in many cases fully enough from its bondage to endow it with a clear and distinct anticipation of the coming event. A large number of historical personages have thus been enabled to predict the day, and many even the hour of their own death. The Connétable de Bourbon, who was besieging Rome, addressed, according to Brantôme (Vies des gr. capitaines, ch. 28), on the day of the final assault, his troops, and told them he would certainly fall before the Eternal City, but without regret if they but proved victorious. Henry IV. of France, felt his death coming, according to the unanimous evidence of Sully, L'Etoile, and Bassompierre, and said, before he entered his coach on the fatal day: "My friend, I would rather not go out to-day; I know I shall meet with misfortune." On the 16th of May, 1813, four days before the battle of Bautzen, two of Napoleon's great officers, the Duke of Vicenza and Marshal Duroc, were in attendance at Dresden while the emperor was holding a protracted conference with the Austrian ambassador. The clock was striking midnight, when suddenly Duroc seized his companion by the arm and with frightfully altered features, looking intently at him, said in trembling tones: "My friend, this lasts too long; we shall all of us perish, and he last of all. A secret voice tells me that I shall never see France again." It is well known that on the day of the battle a cannon-ball which had already killed General Kirchner, wounded Duroc also mortally, and when he lay on his deathbed he once more turned to the Duke of Vicenza and reminded him of the words he had spoken in Dresden.
The trustworthy author of "Eight Months in Japan," N. Lühdorf, tells us (p. 158) a remarkable instance of unconscious foreboding on the part of a common sailor. The American barque Greta was in 1855 chartered to carry a great number of Russians, who had been shipwrecked on board the frigate Diana during an earthquake at Simoda to the Russian port of Ayan. A sailor on board was very ill, and shortly before his death told his comrades that he would soon die, but that he was rather glad of it, as they would all be captured by the English, with whom Russia was then at war. The report of his prediction reached the captain's cabin, but all the officers agreed that such an event was next to impossible; a dense fog was making the ship perfectly invisible, and no English fleet had as yet appeared in the Sea of Okhotsk, where the Russians had neither vessels nor forts to tempt the British. The whole force of England in those waters was at that moment engaged in blockading the Russian fleet in the Bay of Castris in the Gulf of Tartary. Nevertheless it so chanced that a British steamer, the corvette Barracouta, hove in sight on the 1st of August and captured the vessel, making the Russians prisoners of war.
SECOND SIGHT.
A special kind of divination, which has at times been evidenced in certain parts of Europe, and is not unknown to our North-western Indians, consists in the perception of contemporaneous or future events, during a brief trance. Generally the seer looks with painfully raised eyelids, fixedly into space, evidently utterly unconscious of all around him, and engaged in watching a distant occurrence. A peculiar feature of this phenomenon, familiar to all readers as second sight, is the exclusion of religious or supernatural matters; the visions are always strictly limited to events of daily life: deaths and births, battles and skirmishes, baptisms and weddings. The actors in these scenes are often personally unknown to the seer, and the transactions are as frequently beheld in symbols as in reality. A man who is to die a violent death, may be seen with a rope around his neck or headless, with a dagger plunged into his breast, or sinking into the water up to his neck; the sick man who is to expire in his bed, will appear wrapped up in his winding sheet, in which case his person is more or less completely concealed as his death is nearer or farther off. A friend or a messenger coming from a great distance, is seen as a faint shadow, and a murderer or a thief, as a wolf or a fox. Another peculiar feature of second sight is the fact that the same visions are very frequently beheld by several persons, although the latter may live far apart and have nothing in common with each other. The phenomena are sporadic in Germany and Switzerland, in the Dauphiné and the Cevennes; they occur in larger numbers and are often hereditary in certain families, in Denmark, the Scotch Highlands and the Faroe Islands. In Gaelic, the persons thus gifted are called Taishatrim, seers of shadows, or Phissichin, possessing knowledge beforehand. Hence, they have been most thoroughly studied in those countries, and Mr. Martin has gathered all that could be learnt of second sight in the Shetlands, in a work of great interest. Here the phenomena are not unfrequently accompanied by magic hearing also, as when funerals are seen in visions, and at the same time the chants of the bystanders and even the words of the preacher are distinctly heard. The most marked form of this feature is the taisk or wraith, a cry uttered by a person who is soon to die, and heard by the seer. The dwellers on those remote islands are also in the habit of smelling an odor of fish, often weeks and months before the latter appear in their waters. A special kind of divination exists in Wales and on the Isle of Man, where the approaching death of friends is revealed by so-called body lights, caulawillan cyrth.