That rob’d in midnight’s pall the matin hour;
While hurrying feet, and wailings to and fro,
Spread the wild panic of impending woe.
The prince and prelates shudder’d at the sign:
The monk stood dumb before the darken’d shrine:
With faltering hand uprais’d the cross on high,
To chase that dismal omen from the sky.”
The wonders told me by one of my reverend ancestors of the “Aurora,” years ago, are so circumstantial, and withal so prophetic, that well might she, like the Lady of Branxholme, believe that “spirits were riding the northern blast.”
Speed repeats a record in the “Ypodigma Neustriæ” of “Walsingham,” that the rebellion of the Percies was preceded by spectral battles in Bedfordshire, “sundry monsters of divers colours and shapes issuing from woods,” &c.
Remember, it is a matter of history, that phantasms were seen by numbers in Whitehall during the Commonwealth. And the wondrous narrative of The Just Devil of Woodstock, which was writ in 1649, by Master Widows, the learned clerk of Woodstock, “who each day put in writing what he heard from the mouths of the commissioners, and such things as they told to have befallen them the night before; therein keeping to their own words:”—the coney-stealers were so alarmed that they left their ferrets beyond Rosamond’s well. And this he saith also, that “At Saint James’s the Devil so joaled the centinals against the sides of the Queen’s Chappell doors, that some of them fell sick upon it, and others, not taking warning by it, killed one outright; and all other such dreadful things those that inhabited the royal houses have been affrighted with.”