To be sure! The story is proved by these facts—the facts about the students, the nurses, the excitement, the credence given the tale at New York. And now all we have to do is to prove these facts. Ah!—they are proved by the story.
As for the Morning Post, it evinces more weakness in its disbelief than the Record in its credulity. What the former says about doubting on account of inaccuracy in the detail of the phthisical symptoms, is a mere fetch, as the Cockneys have it, in order to make a very few little children believe that it, the Post, is not quite so stupid as a post proverbially is. It knows nearly as much about pathology as it does about English grammar—and I really hope it will not feel called upon to blush at the compliment. I represented the symptoms of M. Valdemar as "severe," to be sure. I put an extreme case; for it was necessary that I should leave on the reader's mind no doubt as to the certainty of death without the aid of the Mesmerist—but such symptoms might have appeared—the identical symptoms have appeared, and will be presented again and again. Had the Post been only half as honest as ignorant, it would have owned that it disbelieved for no reason more profound than that which influences all dunces in disbelieving—it would have owned that it doubted the thing merely because the thing was a "wonderful" thing, and had never yet been printed in a book.
LETHE.
BY HENRY B. HIRST.
Agressi sunt mare tenebrarum id in eo exploraturi esset. Nubian Geographer.
Looking like Lethe, see! the lake
A conscious slumber seems to take,
And would not for the world awake. "The Sleepers." Poe.
There is a lake whose lilies lie
Like maidens in the lap of death,
So pale, so cold, so motionless
Its Stygian breast they press;
They breathe, and toward the purple sky
The pallid perfumes of their breath
Ascend in spiral shapes, for there
No wind disturbs the voiceless air—
No murmur breaks the oblivious mood
Of that tenebrean solitude—
No Djinn, no Ghoul, no Afrit laves
His giant limbs within its waves
Beneath the wan Saturnian light
That swoons in the omnipresent night;
But only funeral forms arise,
With arms uplifted to the skies,
And gaze, with blank, cavernous eyes
In whose dull glare no Future lies,—
The shadows of the dead—the Dead
Of whom no mortal soul hath read,
No record come, in prose or rhyme,
Down from the dim Primeval Time!
A moment gazing—they are gone—
Without a sob—without a groan—
Without a sigh—without a moan—
And the lake again is left alone—
Left to that undisturbed repose
Which in an ebon vapor flows
Among the cypresses that stand
A stone-cast from the sombre strand—
Among the trees whose shadows wake,
But not to life, within the lake,
That stand, like statues of the Past,
And will, while that ebony lake shall last.