There was no accident to the train; but, instead of finding themselves at Bath, they found themselves at Bristol—having, in their conversation, neglected to notice that they had passed Bath. They were put to great inconvenience, and confusion, and difficulty in getting their luggage. I know you too well, Eusebius, not to hear, by anticipation, your laughter at this trifling affair, and the wit with which for a few moments you will throw off your ridicule. You may ask, if the shooting of your corns are not as sure and as serious prognostications? Be it so; and why not, Eusebius? You can tell by them what weather to expect; and, after all, you know little more of the material world, less of the immaterial, and nothing of their mystical union. Nothing now, past, present, and future, may be but terms for we know not what, and cannot comprehend how they can be lost in an eternity. There they become submerged. So take the thing represented, not the paltry, perhaps ridiculous, one through which it is represented. It is the picture, the attitude, the position, the undignified familiarity of yourself with the defects of your own person, that make the ridiculous; but there is grave philosophy, nevertheless, to be drawn from every atom of your own person, if you view it aright. I have heard you eloquent against the "hypocrite
Cicero," as you called him, for his saying, that one Augur meeting another could scarcely help laughing. If mankind chose augury as a sign, it might have been permitted them to find a sign in it. But this is plunging into deeper matter, and one which you will think a quagmire, wherein wiser thoughts may flounder and be lost. When the officers of Hannibal's army were heard to laugh by the soldiery on the morning of the battle of Cannæ, they took it as a good omen. It was generally received, and the day was fatal to the Romans. "Possunt quia posse videntur," you will say; but whence comes the "videntur?" There, Eusebius, you beg the whole question. The wonders and omens, gravely related by Livy, at least portray a general feeling—an impression before events. In the absence of a better religion, I would not have quarrelled with the superstition, and very much join you in your condemnation of the passage in Cicero.
The fatal necessity of event upon event, of omen, dream, and vision, is the great characteristic of the wondrous Greek drama. So awfully portrayed is the Œdipus—and with more grand and prophetic mystery pervading the Agamemnon. Had it not been congenial with popular belief, it could never have been so received; nor, indeed, could somewhat similar (though degraded from their high authority, as standing less alone by their amalgamation with a purer creed) characteristics in some of the plays of our own Shakspeare have touched the mind to wonderment, had there been no innate feeling to which they might, and without effort, unite. The progress, however, of the omen and vision, clearer and clearer, pointing to the very deed, and even while its enactment has commenced, and that fatality by which (prophetic, too) the plainest prophecy is unheeded, contemned, and the Prophetess herself doomed, and knowing herself doomed, may be considered as an epitome of the Grecian creeds upon the subject. It was no vulgar punning spirit that designated the very name of Helen as a cursing omen.
"Τις ποτʹ ὠνὀμαζεν ᾥδʹ "Ες το πᾶν ετητυμς—— "Μή τις όντων οὐχ ορω—— "Μεν προνόαισι τοῦ πεπρωμευόυ "Γλῶσσαν ὲν τύχσ νέμων."
Helen, the destroyer—yes, that was her significant name. The present King of the French was not allowed to assume the title of Valois, which was, strictly speaking, his, and instead assumed that of Duc de Chartres, on account of an evil omen attached to the former name; and that evil omen originating in a curious fact, the seeing of a spectre by that German princess who succeeded the poisoned sister of our second Charles. But there is nothing in modern history more analogous to the fatalities of the Grecian drama than those singular passages relating to the death of Henry the Fourth of France. We have the gravest authority of the gravest historians, that prophecies, warnings, and omens so prepared Henry for his death, that he waited for it with a calm resignation, as to an irresistible fatality. "In fact," (says an eloquent writer in Maga of April 1840,) "it is to this attitude of listening expectation in the king, and breathless waiting for the blow, that Schiller alludes in that fine speech of Wallenstein to his sister, where he notices the funeral knells that sounded continually in Henry's ears; and, above all, his prophetic instinct, that caught the sound from a far distance of his murderer's motions, that could distinguish, amidst all the tumult of a mighty Capital, those stealthy steps."
And does it seem so strange to you, Eusebius, if the ear and the eye, those outposts, as it were, of the ever watchful, spiritual, and intellectual sentinels within man, convey the secret intelligences that most concern him? What is there, Eusebius, so marvellous to your conception, if there be sympathy more than electric between those two worlds, outer Nature and Man himself? If earth, that
with him and for him partook of one curse, with all its accompanying chain and interchange of elements, be still one with him, in utterance and signification, whether of his weal or woe. The sunshine and the gloom enter into him, and are his; they reflect his feelings, or rather they are his feelings, almost become his flesh—they are his bodily sensations. The winds and the waters, in their gentler breathings and their sullen roar, are but the music of his mind, echo his joys, his passions, or funereally rehearse the dirge of his fate.
Reject not, my Eusebius, any fact, because it seems little and trifling; a mite is a wonder in creation, from which deep, hidden truths present themselves. It was a heathen thought, an imperfect conception of the wide sympathy of all nature, and of that meaning which every particle of it can convey, and more significantly as we calculate our knowledge;—it was a heathen thought, that the poet should lament the unlikeliness of the flowers of the field to man in their fall and reappearance. It was not the blessing given to his times to see the perfectness of the truth—the "non omnis moriar" indicated even in his own lament.[36]
I had written thus far, when our friend H—- l—- r looked in upon me, and enquired what I was about; I told him I was writing to you, and the subject of my letter. He is this moment gone, and has left with me these two incidents. They came within his own experience. He remembers, that when he was a boy, he was in a room with several of his brothers, some of whom were unwell, yet not seriously ill. On a sudden, there was a great noise, so great, that it could be compared to nothing but the firing of a pistol—a pane in the window was broken; not, he said, to pieces, but literally to a powder of glass. All in the house heard it, with the exception of one of his brothers, which struck them as very strange. The servants from below, and their mother from above, rushed into the room, fearing one of them might have been shot. The mother, when she saw how it was, told H—- l—- r that his brother, who did not hear the noise, she knew it well, would die. At that same hour next day that brother did die.
The other story is more singular. His family were very intimate with another, consisting of father, mother, and an only daughter—a child. Of her the father was so fond, that he was never happy but when she was with him. It happened that he lost his health, and during his long illness, continually prayed that, when he was gone, his child too should be shortly taken from this world, and that he might be with her in a better. He died—when, a short time after his death, the child, who was in perfect health, came rushing into the presence