Astr. There is a bright side, Evelyn. In Germany, those children which are born on a Sunday are termed “Sontag’s kind,” and are believed to be endowed with the faculty of seeing spirits; these are gifted with a life of happiness.
Ev. And you believe it. Well, for a moment I grant its truth; but it is the reverse in Scotland; the vision is almost ever cheerless, and prophetic of woe. “Does the sight come gloomy o’er your spirit?” asks Mac Aulay. “As dark as the shadow of the moon when she is darkened in her course in heaven, and prophets foretell of future times.” And the anathema of Roderich Dhu’s prophet Brian is dark and gloomy as the legend of his mysterious birth, or its prototype, the impure fable of Atys, and the loves of Jupiter and Sangaris.
Cast. If I am the sylph to charm this moody gentleman from his reveries, I will warn him in the words of a canzonet, even of the 17th century:
“Yet, rash astrologer, refrain;
Too dearly would be won
The prescience of another’s pain,
If purchased by thine own.”
And I will tell him what Collins writes on the perils of the seer, in his “Ode on Highland Superstition,” —
“How they whose sight such dreary dreams engross,
With their own vision oft astonished droop,