The Philosophy of Mystery

by Walter Cooper Dendy

With the coincidences of life we have all been struck; the ignorant and timid and superstitious among us with wonder: but how comparatively trivial are these tiny drops in the wide ocean of events, and what myriads of dreams and visions from which there are no results!

A simple incident occurred to me in the autumn of last year, which was so complete in its association as to be for a moment startling to myself.

Influenced by a sort of veneration for the memory of the good Gilbert White of Selborne, I made a pilgrimage to that calm and rustic village, so exquisitely embosomed among green meads, and beech-crowned chalk hills, and forests embrowned with heath and fern.

On my entrance to the village, I was reflecting on the “idiot boy” who fed on honey which he pressed from the bees he caught, when lo! at the first door a figure, which grinned at me, and mowed and muttered, but without the slightest verbal utterance. He was an idiot, but not White’s idiot; yet a visionary mind might readily for a moment believe it to be a phantom of the foolish boy, immortalized, as it were, in the “Natural History of Selborne.”

There was an imposing occurrence also, during the funeral procession of Sir Walter Scott to Dryburgh. A halt took place for many minutes (in consequence of an accident) precisely on the summit of the hill at Bemerside, where a beautiful prospect opens, to contemplate which, Sir Walter was ever wont to rein up his horse.

“In 1811,” writes Lord Byron in a letter to Mr. Murray, “my old school and form fellow Peel, the Irish secretary, told me he saw me in St. James’s Street; I was then in Turkey. A day or two afterwards he pointed out to his brother a person across the way, and said, ‘There is the man I took for Byron:’ his brother answered, ‘Why, it is Byron, and no one else.’ I was at this time seen to write my name in the Palace Book. I was then ill of a malaria fever. If I had died, here would have been a ghost story.”

While Lord Byron was at Colonna, his dervish Tahiri, as we read in his notes to the “Giaour,” who professed the faculty of second hearing, prophesied an attack of the Mainotes as they passed a certain perilous defile, but nothing came of it: the attack was not made; and it is probable that some ringing in the ears of the dervish, and a knowledge that the defile was a haunt of brigands, were the springs of this notion.

And there are events, too, which have all the intensity of romance and seem involved in the deepest mystery, and which, like Washington Irving’s tale of the “Spectre Bridegroom,” assume all the air of the supernatural, until the enigma is solved, and then we cry, “How clear the solution!”

Among the myriads of explained mysteries in the north, I will cite that of the farmer of Teviotdale, who, in the gloom of evening, saw on the wall of a cemetery a pale form throwing about her arms, and mowing and chattering to the moon. With not a little terror he spurred his horse, but as he passed the phantom it dropped from its perch, and, like Tam o’ Shanter’s Nannie, fixing itself on the croup, clasped him tightly round the waist with arms of icy coldness. He arrived at home; with a thrill of horror exclaimed, “Tak aff the ghaist!” and was carried shivering to bed. And what was the phantom? A maniac widow, on her distracted pilgrimage to the grave of her husband, for whom she had indeed mistaken the ill-fated farmer.

The president of a literary club at Plymouth being very ill during its session, the chair out of respect was left vacant. While they were sitting, his apparition, in a white dress, glided in and took formal possession of the chair. His face was “wan like the cauliflower;” he bowed in silence to the company, carried his empty glass to his lips, and solemnly retired. They went to his house, and learned that he had just expired! The strange event was kept a profound secret, until the nurse confessed on her death-bed that she had fallen asleep, that the patient had stolen out, and, having the pass-key of the garden, had returned to his bed by a short path before the deputation, and had died a few seconds after.