This visitation from another world is one of the surest indications of our spirituality; and like the reanimation of soul and mind, and consciousness, from deep and undreaming sleep, lighting up the body into brilliancy and beauty, might drown a sceptic’s reasoning in a flood of holy faith, and overwhelm him with the belief of immortality.
Cast. It is this combination of vitality and death—so seemingly a paradox—that forms the basis of many of our deepest romances; as the “Spectre Life in Death,” in the Ancient Mariner, of the melancholy Coleridge,—himself a wild visionary of the first order. If I remember, he is writing of a spectre ship. —
——“Betwixt us and the sun.
And straight the sun was fleck’d with bars —
(Heaven’s mother send us grace!)
As if through a dungeon-grate he peer’d
With broad and burning face.
Alas! (thought I, and my heart beat loud,)
How fast she neers and neers.
Are those her sails that glance in the sun,