The Reformation
An instance of a dying man punning upon his own name is furnished in the case of John Huss, the Bohemian Reformer. Huss was burned at the stake, in Constance, July 6, 1415, the anniversary of his birth. Shortly before he was overcome by the heat of the flames, he said, “It is thus that you silence the goose (huss = a goose), but a hundred years hence there will arise a swan whose singing you shall not be able to silence.” On November 10, 1483, was born Martin Luther, who is generally regarded, and rightly so, as having fulfilled this remarkable prophecy to the letter.
Emancipation
The following lines, prophetic of our Civil War, were written in 1850 by James Russell Lowell, in his “Capture of Certain Fugitive Slaves near Washington:”
“Out from the land of bondage ’tis decreed our slaves shall go,
And signs to us are offered as erst to Pharaoh;
If we are blind, their exodus, like Israel’s of yore,
Through a Red Sea, is doomed to be, whose surges are of gore.”
The French Revolution
In the “Memoirs of Madame Du Barry” is the following anecdote: