This strange story, believed by good and wise men, involved a seeming mystery, until we read in Mr. Jervis’s “Remarks,” one simple sentence in reference to the gentleman by whom it was first told,—that “the enthusiasm of his nature predisposed him to entertain some visionary and romantic notions of supernatural appearances.”
PHANTASY FROM MENTAL ASSOCIATION.
“This is the very coinage of your brain:
This bodiless creation, ecstacy
Is very cunning in.”
Hamlet.
Cast. How delightful to wander thus among the reliques of that age, when her citizens, the colonists of Britain, migrated from imperial Rome, and built their Venta Silurum, or Caerwent, from the ruins of which these now mouldering walls were formed. As we trod those pictured pavements of Caerwent beneath the blue sky of yesternoon, I felt all the inspiration of Astrophel, and a pageantry of Roman patricians seemed to sweep along the fragments of those painted tesselæ.
“Lulled in the countless chambers of the brain,
Our thoughts are link’d by many a hidden chain;
Awake but one, and lo! what myriads rise,