Transcriber’s Notes

Obvious typographical errors have been silently corrected. Variations in hyphenation have been standardised but all other spelling and punctuation remains unchanged.

The table of contents was added by the transcriber.

The cover was prepared by the transcriber and is placed in the public domain.

YIEGER’S CABINET.

SPIRITUAL VAMPIRISM:

THE HISTORY

OF

ETHERIAL SOFTDOWN,

AND

Her Friends of the “New Light.”

BY C. W. WEBBER,
AUTHOR OF
“OLD HICKS THE GUIDE,” “CHARLES WINTERFIELD PAPERS,” “THE HUNTER-NATURALIST,” “TALES OF THE SOUTHERN BORDER,” ETC.

A heavy, hell-like paleness loads her cheeks,

Unknown to a clear heaven.

John Marston.

O vulture-witch, hast never heard of mercy?

Endymion.

PHILADELPHIA:
LIPPINCOTT, GRAMBO & CO.
1853.

Entered, according to Act of Congress, in the year 1853, by
LIPPINCOTT, GRAMBO & CO.,
in the Clerk’s Office of the District Court of the United States, in and for
the Eastern District of Pennsylvania.

STEREOTYPED BY J. FAGAN. T. K. AND P. G. COLLINS, PRINTERS.

Contents.

INTRODUCTION.

On page 392 of the concluding sketch of a late series, the “Tales of the Southern Border,” occurs the following passage:—

“THE ESCRITOIRE.

“The author, being a resident of New York during the period of the leading incidents narrated as occurring in that city, had formed the acquaintance of the principal personage. Himself a Southerner, he had, from the natural affinities of origin, inevitably been attracted toward Carter. The intercourse between them, at first reserved, had imperceptibly warmed into a degree of intimacy, which, however, had by no means been such as to render him at all cognisant, beyond the merest generalities, of the progress of his private affairs. He was not a little surprised, therefore, at finding, one day, an elegant escritoire or cabinet, of dark, rich wood, heavily banded in the old-fashioned style with silver, which had been placed, in his absence, on the table of his sanctum. A note, in a sealed envelope, lay upon it. He instantly recognised the handwriting of the address as that of Mr. Carter, and broke the seal.

“It was evidently written in great haste, but without any sign of trepidation. It ran thus:—

“My dear Friend:

“I have no time for explanations, as I am in the midst of hurried preparations for an unexpected yacht-voyage—upon which I set sail in a few minutes. I send you an escritoire, which was left in my charge by a highly valued friend. He was an extraordinary man; and its contents will be, I doubt not, of great value to the world.

“It was given me, with the injunction that it should not be opened until six months after his death. The six months were up some weeks since, but I have lately been too much otherwise absorbed to think of making use of the privilege of the key. I now therefore transfer to you this bequest in full, with the proviso that you will not open it for six months. If at the end of that time I have not been heard from, please open, and without reserve make what use of it your excellent sense may justify. Please take charge of whatever correspondence may arrive to my address for the same length of time, at the expiration of which you will also please to consider yourself as my executor—open my correspondence and proceed as you may think best. Pardon this unceremonious intrusion of responsibilities upon an intimacy, the terms of which I hardly feel would strictly justify me; but the plea that I know no one else whom I can trust, and have no time for further explanation, will I am sure justify me in the eyes of a brother Southron.

“Yours truly,
“Frank Carter.

“Six months having elapsed, and still no news of my singular friend Carter, the fulfilment of the important duties of executor, thus unexpectedly devolved upon him, were deferred by the narrator as long as his sense of duty would possibly admit. At last, when longer delay would have seemed to assume almost the aspect of criminality, the duty of opening the cabinet was unwillingly entered upon.”

On my next meeting with my friend Carter, who proved still to be in the land of the living, I spoke to him of the cabinet and its remarkable contents, which had so unexpectedly been left in my charge; offering to resign to him my trusteeship. To this, however, he would by no means consent, but continued to insist, as in his original letter, that I should without reserve make what use of it my sense of propriety might dictate. I was finally overruled into undertaking the mere arrangement and editorship of its contents—for the revelations there made are in many respects so strangely horrifying and unusual, that I fear the world will be little disposed to pardon my agency in giving them publicity. However, as I believe them to be, in every respect, genuine life-experiences, I have determined to make the venture, come what will of it. We shall therefore give, as proper introduction to the singular narrative which we have selected from beneath the blood-stained seals of the cabinet it has been our fate to open, the following singular paper, which we found lying separately above the folds of the MS. which constitutes the History of Etherial Softdown.

THE PHILOSOPHY OF MESMERIC IMPOSITION.

TO BE READ BY PHILOSOPHERS ONLY.[1]

[1] The Story begins at Chapter I.—Ed.

The existence of what may be called the nervous or Odic fluid—the sympathetic element—has been partially known to all ages. The knowledge of this powerful secret, in moving and controlling mankind, has been professionally and almost exclusively confined to the adepts of all sects, religions, and periods; though it has occasionally, in various ways, leaked out of the penetralia, principally through its forms, accompanied with little or no apprehension of their vital meaning. It is in this way that a series of scientific phenomena, the discovery of which probably originated with a remote priestcraft, and had been made to subserve exclusive ends, has gradually been fragmented among the people, and in many imperfect, ignorant, and vitiated forms has now become the common property of science.

When it is understood that this nervous fluid is nothing more nor less than that force—whether electrical, magnetic, odic, or otherwise named—which, lubricating the nervous system in man, produces all vital phenomena—is, in a word, the vital force—the active principle of life—it will not be difficult to comprehend how important a knowledge of its laws may be rendered to even those relations of life not exclusively physical.

Mesmer promulgated, under his own name, as a new and astounding discovery in science, something of the sympathetic laws to which this nervous or Odic fluid is subject, and by

which the vital and spiritual relations of man to the external universe are in a great measure modified, and even controlled. This was no discovery of his, but had been the mainly exclusive secret of the ancient priesthood; employed alike in the ceremonies of the novitiate in the Thibetian temples of Buddha, in the Egyptian Initiation, and in Grecian Pythism. But the particular reason why his announcements caused such prodigious excitement, in 1784, as to run all Paris mad, even including the court of the wary Louis XVI., and still continue to excite and madden mankind, is, that, as the sympathetic ecstacies and furors, superinduced by the mummeries of his famous “vat,” were called by a new name, the people failed to recognise them, although they had been familiarised with, and even acting habitually under their influence, while surrounded by accessories of a more sacred character. The immediate success of Mesmer’s experiments amazed men. He, in fact, little knew what he was doing himself; the effects he understood how to produce, because accident had furnished him with the formulas. Having gone through these, which, though most grotesque and preposterous, later experience has shown, really included all the “passes” and other conditions necessary to establish sympathy through the nervous fluid with the victims of his delusion, he proceeded to produce exhibitions the most extraordinary the world ever saw, except in the hideous and frantic orgies of some wild, barbaric creed, and the parallels to which, in this country, are to be found in the shrieks and bellowings of a fanatic camp-meeting, Miller ascension-tent, Mormon rite, or hard-cider political mass-meeting.

Beginning with the postulate that “Nature abhors a vacuum,” it does not seem difficult to understand something, at least, of the rationale of this sympathetic influence of one man over another. The laws of the distribution of this Odic force seem to bear a somewhat general affinity to those of electricity. The surcharged cloud discharges its superfluous fluid into the cloud more negatively charged. The man holding a superfluous amount of vital or Odic force, can dismiss a portion of this—along the course of its proper lightning-rods, or conveyers, the nerves—into the organisation of a being more negatively charged, or, in other words, of a weaker man. As electricity can only act upon inert matter through its proper media, the elements, so the Odic fluid can only act upon organised matter normally through its proper medium, the nerves of vitality. This communication of the Odic fluid, by which sympathy between the two beings has been established, can be, to a certain degree, regulated and controlled by manipulations which bring the thumbs and fingers of the hand, which are properly Odic poles, in contact with certain great nerves, or centres of nerves, along which the influence can be readily communicated. These manipulations, the vital and original meanings of which these Mesmer agitators have betrayed, may be traced very clearly through the most important ceremonies of religion, and the secret orders of fraternisation in the world. From this point of view, how significant the “laying-on of hands” in ordination, the “joining of hands” in the marriage ceremony, &c.

Here let us remark, that we would no more be understood as accusing a Christian Priesthood, in modern times, of having made an improper use, either inside or out of their profession, of the manipulations mentioned above, than we would think of accusing them of having, as a class, any special knowledge of their significance beyond that of ceremonial forms, set down in the discipline. It has been to the Heathen Priesthood that we have consistently attributed a knowledge of the psychological meaning of these ceremonials, which have descended through the Hebrew and Christian churches as avowedly divested of vital significance, and intended, in their arbitrary exaction, as, to a certain degree, ordained tests of Christian faith and obedience.

But it is by no means indispensable to the exhibition of the Odic phenomena, that the processes of manipulation should have been literally gone through with in all cases—nor, indeed, in the majority even—for some of the most apparently inexplicable and extraordinary of them all are brought about without such intervention. Take, as comparatively “modern instances,” such effects as those produced by the preaching of Peter the Hermit, when not only vast armies of men were moved like flights of locusts toward the Desert, on the breeze of his fiery breath, to disappear, too, as they, within its bosom, and never be heard from again, but even great armies of children rushed in migratory hordes to the sea-ports, to ship for the Holy Land!—and those produced by the crusade of Father Mathew against intemperance, in our time, when all Ireland lay wailing at his feet. These great furors were precisely identical with those already enumerated, so far as the sympathetic or motive power went. So with the story of the rise of Mahomet, Joe Smith, Miller, and all such agitators. They are usually men of prodigious vital power, and of course surcharged with the Odic fluid, who begin these great movements; and they possess, beside, vast patience and endurance. They begin by filling the individuals in immediate contact with them, as Mahomet did his own family, with the superfluity of the Odic force in themselves, and having thus obtained a single medium by this immediate contact—which, although it may not imply the formal manipulations with preconceived design, implies the accidental equivalents—the circle gradually enlarges through each fresh accession, in much the same way that it began, until, after a few patient years of unshaken endurance, the apostle finds himself surrounded by thousands and thousands of human beings, whose volition is swayed through this Odic force—this sympathetic medium—by his own central, resolute, and self-poised will, as if they were but one man. His moveless volition has been, from the beginning, the base and axis of the vast sympathetic movement going on around him, and upon the single strength of the Odic force within him, all depends, until, through a thorough organisation of ceremonial laws and observances, the system of which he was the vital centre assumes a corporate existence, and can stand alone.

This is about the method in which all such organisations, radiating from the one man power or centre, widen their circles to an extreme circumference, until the force of the pebble thrown into the great lake is exhausted. So it is with all sympathetic excitements—from the Dancing Dervishes, the Shaking Quakers, or the Barking Brothers, to the vast Empire of France, led frenzied over the world in the will-o’-the-wisp chase of universal sovereignty, by the fantastic will of a Napoleon. These are some of the general phenomena of sympathy, and there are many quite as extraordinary, if not as broad in what are called atmospheric or epidemic conditions, which go to prove the universality of this sympathetic law.

The distinctions between Od and Heat, Od and Electricity, as well as Od and Magnetism, have been so clearly demonstrated by the investigations of Baron Reichenbach as to leave at present no choice between the terms. Od expresses that force which, differing in many essential properties from the other two, can alone through its phenomena be reconciled with what we know of the Sympathetic or Nervous Fluid. It is therefore used as a synonym of this mysterious agency, and as conveying a far higher definition and significance than either the term Electricity or Mesmerism.

The worst and the best that the agitation begun by Mesmer has accomplished, is, to have stripped old Necromancy of its mysterious spells, by revealing something of the rationale of them, while at the same time, in unveiling its processes to the sharp eyes of modern knaves, they have been enabled to appropriate and practise them again with even more than the old success, under the new christening of “scientific experiment.” It is, I think, easily enough shown, by a minute and circumstantial comparison of the cotemporary history of the dark age of black art ascendancy in Europe, which was literally the dark age of chivalry, with that of Cotton Mather witch-burning enlightenment in New England, that the arts practised by the accused in both these countries, and at all other such periods in all other countries, were nearly identical with each other; and those familiarised to us through the doings of mesmeric manipulation, revelation, clairvoyance, spiritual knockings, &c., &c., are generally the very same, though assuming slight shades of difference, indicating some progressive development. A partial knowledge of psychological laws, which was formerly, and with great plausibility, considered altogether too dangerous pabulum for the vulgar mind, has been sown broadcast by the empiricism of this mesmeric movement, the principal oracles and expounders of which have been clearly as ignorant of the causes with which they agitated, as ever wrinkled crone of peat-smoked hovel was of the true laws of that occult palmistry, through the practice, or vague traditions of which, she finally prophesied herself into the martyrdom of the “red-hot ploughshares,” or the warm resting-place of the pot of boiling pitch. They only know that certain formulas produce certain results, and as they are blundering entirely in the dark, they mix those which have a basis in science with the crude and meaningless forms which ignorance, with its abject cunning, easily supplies. From such amalgamations have arisen the mummeries of conjuration in whatever form, and by the imprudent use of which, the credulous, simple and superstitious, are so easily “frightened from their propriety,” and thus made easy victims of more dangerous arts.

But it is a study of the fearful uses which have been made by the evil-disposed, of this partial knowledge of the laws of relation of soul to the body, that is more interesting now than these olden disguises of the same evil in more helpless forms; as now, through the mesmeric agitation, it has really attained to some gleam of causes—has now something of scientific illumination to steady and give direction to its reckless and deadly aim. In the radius of its hurtful circumference, the vicious power of the witch, fortune-teller or conjuror, was as much more circumscribed than that of the semi-scientific charlatan of clairvoyance, as the vision of the mole is less than that of the viper, which, at least, looks out into the sunshine though every cloud may impede its malignant gaze.

The relative degrees in which the Odic or sympathetic fluid may be found exhibited in the different individuals of our race, have been previously remarked in general terms. In the sexes, we most usually find the positive pole in man, who gives out, and the negative in woman, who receives and absorbs from him, the dispenser. Though this be the general rule so far as the sexes are concerned, it is by no means the universal rule for the race—since there are among men but few positive poles, or fixed centres of Odic radiation; and where such are found, they are observed to possess much of what we commonly call “influence” with or upon others. All the parties, therefore, within the circle of this sympathetic radiation, or “magnetic attraction,” as it is popularly termed, must necessarily be, relatively to this positive pole, negative poles, without regard to sex—while each of these comparatively negative poles may in turn be a positive pole, or Odic centre, to those below or of weaker nature than himself.

Those men who have been known to all humanity as prophets, poets, law-givers, discoverers, reformers, &c., are, and have been, what we mean by positive Odic poles; for while they have seemed to stand in immediate and direct communion with the spiritual source of all wisdom, they have at the same time given out the impulse thus granted, to the people by whom they are surrounded, thus acting as the chosen media of divine revelation, and from the cloudy summits of Sinais handing down the tables of the law to all the tribes.

Now there is a mighty radiation of the Odic force from these men, through which the love, wisdom, or rather will in them—or sent through them—is made operative upon the great masses of mankind; and this same radiation, in the greater or less degrees, is found emanating from a thousand different sources at the same time, affecting man for evil as well as for good; for, when we comprehend that this Odic or sympathetic force is the sole medium of communication with the spiritual and invisible world, as well as with the visible and material world, it can then be easily understood how what are called “evil” and “good spirits” should through it affect mankind. This will be fully illustrated when we observe the common conditions of health and disease. Health is good and disease is evil; and these are the two eternally antagonistic chemical forces in the universe. Health is that normal condition of the body which enables it to resist evil and maintain the proper balance of the spiritual and material elements. Disease is that abnormal condition of the body in which the integrity of the spiritual and organic functions has been destroyed through the sympathetic media by evil, and good overcome.

In either case, the balance is destroyed, and the immediate consequence may be, in the one, sudden paroxysms of fearful insanity, or in the other, sudden death, as in common apoplexy.

Thus the popular fallacy, that all things having a source in the spiritual, or rather the invisible, must of necessity be good, is in a very simple way exposed. We see there may be what are called evil, as well as good spirits, which hold communion with us; and the safest and only true general rule with regard to such matters is, that, while the good spirits are those propitious chemical forces which make themselves known to us in love, and joy, and peace, through the unbounded happiness of the normal conditions of health, the evil spirits are those vicious chemical forces, morbid delusions, and malign revelations, which are made known to us through all other diseased conditions as well as that of Clairvoyance. Remember that no such being has yet been known throughout the whole range of Mesmeric experiment as a healthy Clairvoyant, or a “subject” who has attained to the super-eminence of Clairvoyance, who was not what they fancifully term “delicate”—that is, liable to those diseases which are well known to supervene upon nervous weakness, exhaustion, or emasculation. This condition of nervous exhaustion renders them, of course, the very negation of the negative pole of sympathy, and the first person approaching them, who possesses the ordinary Odic conditions of health, is clutched hold of by their famine-struck vitality, in the agonised plea for life! life!

“Give! give!” is still the insatiable cry. They must have the Odic fluid restored, and that, in taking from your “enough,” they exhaust and undermine the holy purposes of your life to make up that deficit in their own—which loathsome vice has brought about—the “hideous selfishness of weakness” rather rejoices. The sympathetic rapporte being once established, they can at least, through this dangerous medium, live in the integrities of your life, and enjoy, both physically and spiritually, a surreptitious vitality, which, while it reflects the prevailing phenomena of your own mind and spiritual being, has, in addition, some approximation even to the physical exaltation of your higher health.

These human vampires or sponges may be, therefore, as well absorbents of the spiritual as animal vitality. Their parasitical roots may strike into the very centres of life, and their hungry suckers remorselessly draw away the virility of manhood, or the spiritual strength.

They seem to be mainly divided into two classes, one of which, born, seemingly, with but a rudimentary soul, attains to its apparent spiritual though merely mental development, by absorption of the spiritual life in others, through the Odic medium. Another class, born with a predominating spirituality based upon a feeble physique, is ravenous of animal strength, and can only live by its sympathetic absorption of the same from others, through the same pervading medium. Of the two, the first is the evil type; for, born in the gross sphere of the passions, with a vigorous organisation, but faintly illuminated at the beginning with that golden light of love which is spiritual life, the fierce half-monkey being is propelled onwards, and even upwards, by the basest of the purely animal instincts, appetites, and lusts. If such beings strive towards the light of the harmonious and the beautiful, it is not because they yearn for either the holy or the good, but because it lends a lurid charm to appetite and glorifies a lust.

The other character, in whom the spiritual predominates, whether from a natal inequality, as is very frequently the case, or from the sheer exhaustion of the physical powers, through emasculating vices, is yet, in itself, good, so far as its morbid conditions leave it an unaccountable being; but, as its revelations and utterings depend entirely upon the Odic characters and will of those from whom its strength may be derived, it can only be regarded, whether used for evil or good, as a medium. This character is the common Clairvoyant, to whom we are indebted for those strangely-mingled gleams of remote truth, with errors the most grave and injurious, which have so tended to confuse the judgment of mankind in regard to the phenomena of Clairvoyance. Such persons can be made as readily the medium of any falsehood which the knavish passions of their “Mesmerisers” may dictate, as they can be caused to announce, by a will as strong, but soul more pure, the disconnected myths of science and of history, which have so surprised the world in what are called the “Revelations” of Andrew Jackson Davis. This man belongs to our second class, and is purely “a medium” of the sympathetic fluid. His organisation is most sensibly sympathetic and delicately responsive, but is too feeble to balance his spiritual development. His case stands, therefore, as the most remarkable modern instance of what the ancients termed “vaticination;” but, as has been the case with other false prophets, his “gifts” have proved of no value, except to knaves. He was undoubtedly practised upon by a choice set of such characters; and, now that he has found in marriage a sympathetic restoration, through the physical, of its needed balance with the spiritual, he has lost his “lying gift” of prophecy.

We have examined this man carefully, and are convinced that the whole mystery of his revelations and character may be contained in a nut-shell. He is to the sphere of intellectual and spiritual sympathy, and in a lower sense, precisely an analogous case with that of Mozart in the sphere of the musical and spiritual. When the great soul of humanity has been long—say one generation—in travail with a great thought in art, science, music, or mechanics, there is sure to be somebody born in the succeeding generation who is physically, mentally, and spiritually, the impersonation and embodiment of this thought, of which the age is in labor, and who must of necessity become, solely and singly, the expression and embodiment thereof. Thus Mozart, the infant prodigy in music, who at five years old was the pet of monarchs and the miracle of his age, continued, with no signs of precociousness, a steady and consistent development, which showed him to be indeed the embodiment of the musical inspirations of his age. His revelations in music were just as prodigious as even the rabid worshippers of the Davis revelations would imagine those to be; yet there are some most essential differences between the results of the two.

Davis, born amidst the travail of this new Mesmeric agitation, became the most sensitive organ of the sympathetic fluid in intellect, as the other had been in music; but as, in the case of Mozart, the exciting cause came from Nature, and constituted her purest and most sacred inspirations, so the inspiration of Davis came from man, with all his imperfections and subjective tendencies. The sequel has been, the inspirations of Mozart are considered now by mankind as only second to the Divine, while those of Davis are justly regarded as morbid, fragmentary, incomplete, and worthless.

The organisation of Mozart was equally sympathetic with that of Davis; but it was of that healthy tone which could only respond to nature and the natural; while the organisation of Davis belongs to that much inferior type, which, from its morbid and unbalanced conditions, can respond only to the human as the representative of nature. Such persons receive nothing direct from nature, but only through its representative, man.

It would seem as if the world were absolutely divided into two classes—the radiating and the absorbing; the first receiving from nature, and the second from man. In the first, are the holy brotherhood of prophets and the poets, and in the second, the poor slaves of sympathy—the knaves and fools—the impostors who play upon its well-known laws, and, deceiving themselves as well as others, may well be said to “know not what they do.”

We are convinced that no man, who has kept himself informed of the psychological history and progress of his race, can by any means fail to recognise at once, in the pretended “Revelations” of Davis, the mere disjecta membra of the systems so extensively promulgated by Fourier and Swedenborg. When you come to compare this fact with the additional one, that Davis, during the whole period of his “utterings,” was surrounded by groups, consisting of the disciples of Fourier and Swedenborg; as, for instance, the leading Fourierite of America was, for a time, a constant attendant upon those mysterious meetings, at which the myths of innocent Davis were formally announced from the condition of Clairvoyance, and transcribed by his keeper for the press, while the chief exponent and minister of Swedenborgianism in New York was often seated side by side with him.

Can it be possible that these men failed to comprehend, as thought after thought, principle after principle, was enunciated in their presence, which they had previously supposed to belong exclusively to their own schools, that the “revelation” was merely a sympathetic reflex of their own derived systems? It was no accident; for, as often as Fourierism predominated in “the evening lecture,” it was sure that the prime representative of Fourier was present; and when the peculiar views of Swedenborg prevailed, it was equally certain that he was forcibly represented in the conclave. Sometimes both schools were present; and on that identical occasion we have a composite metaphysics promulgated, which exhibited, most consistently, doctrines of Swedenborg and Fourier, jumbled in liberal and extraordinary confusion. This is, in epitome, about the whole history of such agitations. The weak Clairvoyant falls naturally into the hands of knaves who are superior to him in physical vitality. He becomes, first, the medium of their vague and feeble intellection; and then, as attention is attracted by the notoriety they know well how to produce, the “medium” becomes gradually surrounded by the enthusiasts of every school; and as he is brought into their various Odic spheres, he pronounces the creed of each in his morbidly illuminated language, and it sounds to the mob like inspiration.

There is no greater nonsense; men are inspired through natural laws. But this comparatively innocuous character, which we have thus far stepped aside to indicate, is nothing compared to the first specimen of this Clairvoyant type which we have classified. This, it will be remembered, is the animal born with feeble spirituality, but vigorous physique, which is, at the same time, intensely sympathetic. These, as we have said, are the infernal natures; for, possessing no life outside the lower animal passions, self is to them the close centre of all being, and their Odic sensitiveness a vampire-absorption, the horrible craving of which, not content with the mere exhaustion of the animal life of the victim, by wanton provocations, drinks up soul and mind to fill the beastly void of their own. These worse than ghouls, that live upon the dying rather than the dead, possess some fearfully dangerous and extraordinary powers.

Vampirism, as a superstition, prevailed, not many years ago, like a general pestilence, throughout the countries of Servia and Wallachia. Whole districts, infected by this horrible disease, were desolated; people grew wild with terror, and, in their savage ignorance, committed monstrous sacrilege upon the sanctities of burial. Bodies that had rested quietly in their graves for ten, twenty, and even eighty days, were dragged forth, to have stakes driven through their chests; and if any blood was found, they were burned to ashes.

The belief was, that the deceased, when living, had been bitten by a human vampire, which, coming forth from its grave by night, had sunk its white teeth in his throat, and drunk his blood, thereby causing a lingering death; in which he was also doomed to the hideous fate of becoming a vampire, after his burial.

The bodies of vampires, when dug up, presented a perfectly natural appearance; and, even in those cases where the scarfskin peeled off, a new skin was found underneath, and new nails formed on the fingers. The vital blood was found in the heart, lungs, and viscera, exhibiting the conditions of perfect health. How the vampire got out of his grave, without scratching a hole, does not appear.

Thus we find, in modern vampirism, a strange compound of ancient superstition with well-known scientific truths. The vampire is the counterpart of the ancient ghoul, with the simple transfer of the habits of the vampire-bat to its identity. These are then connected with the fact, well known to the medical profession, that persons have been buried, supposed to be dead, who, in reality, had only fallen into what is called the death-trance; and who, had they been left above ground for a sufficient period, would have probably resuscitated of themselves. That they have done so after burial, is a familiar fact; since bodies exhumed, long after, have been found to have changed their position in the coffin. How long bodies, thus inconsiderately buried, retain a resemblance to the normal conditions of life, has not been fully ascertained.

We have here the historical origin of what is called vampirism; but there are certain phenomena of this fearful infection, closely resembling those which we have attributed to the Spiritual Vampire.

Vampirism is clearly a disease of the nervous system; it being first excited through the imagination of ignorance and superstition. The nerves, then affected through the odic medium, lose their balance, and the mind constantly playing within the circle of the one thought of horror, a rapid and premature decline is the immediate consequence.

The infection of which the victim died remaining still within the odic medium of the sphere it occupied, passes into the nerves of others, who die also; and thus the disease spreads like any other epidemic. But mark—whence the true origin of this superstition of the ghoul and the vampire, so universal in the world? Is it not that mankind, everywhere, has felt, with an unconscious shuddering, the presence of the spiritual vampire? The instincts of the masses have, in their superstitions, foreshadowed all the great discoveries of science. Has it not been, that they have felt the hideous incubus always; but not being able, through any connected series of observations, to discover the real cause of their dread and suffering, have given its nearly identical attributes a “local habitation and a name” among their superstitions?

What we have termed the Spiritual Vampire, is a scientific fact—we believe as much so as the bat-vampire; and that it feeds, not alone upon the living, but upon the spiritually dead; that originally, so far as its spiritual entity is concerned, it too comes forth from its sensual charnal to feed upon the soul-blood of mankind. This may seem a horrible picture, but we cannot consent to withdraw it. These records were made under a sense of duty to mankind; and if they should ever see the light, it must be as they have been written. We dare not reveal all that we know of this thing—we can only venture to say enough to arouse men in amazement, at the realisation of what they have always known and felt to exist, without having expressed it. No mortal mind could have conceived such possibilities, even in hell, much less in actual life.

Amidst the profound securities of the best-ordered households in the world, unless a strict eye be had to such facts and phenomena as we have adverted to and shall describe, the most insidious and fatal corruptions of the bodies and souls of your children, your wives, and your sisters, may creep in, while there is no dream of wrong or danger. If we shock you, it is to put you somewhat upon your guard against the many evils, concealed under the apparent harmless approaches of the viciously-purposed manipulator, or the covert practiser upon the odic or sympathetic vitality of the pure and unsuspecting.—We will abide the issue.

Milton clearly had vampirism in his thought when he wrote—

“Clotted by contagion,

Imbodied and imbruited, till quite lost

The divine property of their first being—

Such are those thick and gloomy shadows damp,

Oft seen, in charnal-vaults and sepulchres,

Lingering and sitting by a new-made grave.”

SPIRITUAL VAMPIRISM;
OR,
THE HISTORY OF ETHERIAL SOFTDOWN.

CHAPTER I.
THE GIRLHOOD OF ETHERIAL.

“Be thou a spirit of health, or goblin damned?”

In a mean and sterile district of Vermont, which shall be nameless, but which exhibits on every side stretches of bare land, with here and there the variety of clumps of gnarled and stunted oaks, Etherial Softdown was born. If mountains give birth to heroes, what ought to have been the product of a low-lying land like this, on whose dreary basins the summer’s sun wilted the feeble vegetation, and the bleak winds of winter wrestled fiercely with the scrubby oaks, whose crooked and claw-like limbs seemed talons of some hideous, gaunt and reptile growth?

On the edge of one of the most desolate of these stretches, and beneath the shelter of the most ugly of these demonised oaks, were scattered the storm-blackened sheds of a miserable hamlet, in one of which, for there were no degrees in their comfortless dilapidation, the family of our heroine, the Softdowns, resided, and another yet smaller and at some distance apart from the rest, was occupied by her father, who was a shoemaker, as a workshop. This was one of those strange, out-of-the-way, starved and dismal looking places that you sometimes stumble upon in our prosperous land—which ought long since to have been deserted with the vanished cause of the temporary prosperity which had given it birth—but in which the people seem to be petrified into a morbid serenity of endurance, and look as if under the spell of some great Enchanter they awaited his awakening touch.

The child, which was the birth of a coarsely organised mother, was as drolly deformed with its squint eye and stooping shoulders as fancy could depict the elfin genius of such a scene. Dirty, bedraggled and neglected, with unkempt locks tangled and writhing like snakes about her face, and sharp, gray animal eyes gleaming from beneath, the ill-conditioned creature darted impishly hither and yon amidst the hamlet hovels, or peering from some thicket of weird oaks, started the stolid neighbors with the dread that apparitions bring.

Indeed, so wilful, unexpected and eccentric were her movements, that the people, in addition to regarding the oaf-like child with a half feeling of dread, gave her the credit of being half-witted as well. There was a hungry sharpness in her eye that made them shrink; a furious, raging, craving lust for something, they could not understand what, which startled them beyond measure; for, as in their stagnant lives, they had never been much troubled with souls themselves, they could not understand this soul-famine that so whetted those fierce eager eyes.

The father, Softdown, who appears to have been something more developed than the mother, and to have possessed a grotesque and rugged wit, more remarkable for its directness than its delicacy, became the sole instructor and companion of the distraught child, who readily acquired from him an uncouth method of enouncing trite truisms unexpectedly, which was to constitute in after life one of her chief, because most successful weapons.

Etherial early displayed a passion for acquiring not knowledge, but a facility of gibberish, which proved exhausting enough to the shallow receptacles around her, especially as her mode of getting at the names and properties of things so closely resembled the monkey’s method of studying physical laws. She had first to burn her fingers before she could be made to comprehend that fire was hot, but that was enough about fire for this wise child; she remembered it ever after as a physical sensation, and therefore it had ever after a name for her; and so with all other experiences, they were to her sensational, not spiritual or intellectual. The name of a truth could come to her with great vividness through a blow or pain of whatever character that might be purely physical, but through no higher senses, for these she did not yet possess. Of a moral sense she seemed now to develop no more consciousness than any other wild animal, but in her the memory of sensation took the place of mind and soul.

Thus passed the girlhood of our slattern oaf—shy and sullen—avoiding others herself, and gladly avoided by them, with the single exception of her father, from whom her strong imitative or sympathetic faculty was daily acquiring a rough, keen readiness of repartee, in the use of which she found abundant home-practice in defending herself against the smarting malignity of the matron Softdown, who charmingly combined in her person and habits all and singly the cleanly graces of the fishwife.

At sixteen, with no advance in personal loveliness, with passions fiercely developed, a mind nearly utterly blank, a taste for tawdry finery quite as drolly crude as that displayed by the plantation negresses of the South, and manners so fantastically awkward and eccentric as to leave the general impression that she was underwitted, Etherial suddenly married a lusty and good-looking young Quaker, threw off her bedraggled plumes, and became a member of that prim order.

Now her career commences in earnest, for this was the first great step in her life in which she seems to have attained to some gleams of the knowledge of that extraordinary power of Odic irradiation and absorption which was afterwards to be exercised with such remarkable results.

She did not make her great discovery without comprehending its meaning quickly. She first perceived that, day by day, she grew more comely to look upon—that her figure was becoming erect, and losing its harsh angularities—the pitiless obliquity of her features growing more reconciled to harmonious lines—and last, and most astounding, that the immediate result of the contact of marriage had been a rapid increase of her own spiritual and mental illumination, accompanied as well by a corresponding decline on the part of the husband in both these respects.

Here was a secret for you with a vengeance! Like an electric flash, a new light burst upon Etherial; and, as there was only one feeling of which her being was capable towards man, she chuckled over the delicious secret which now opened out before her with a terrible gloating.

Glorious discovery! Hah! the spiritual vampire might feed on his strength—might grow strong on this cannibalism of the soul! and what of him if she dragged him down into idiocy? Served him right! Did Etherial care that his spiritual death must be her life? She laughed and screamed with the joy of unutterable ferocity! Eureka! Eureka! They shall all be my slaves! They taunt me with being born without a soul, with being underwitted! I shall devour souls hereafter by the hundreds! I shall grow fat upon them! We shall see who has the wit! Their thoughts shall be my thoughts, their brains shall work for me, their spirits shall inform my frame! Ah, glorious! glorious! I shall live on souls hereafter! I shall go up and down in the land, seeking whom I may devour! Delicious! Delectable Etherial!

CHAPTER II.
SCENES IN THE GOTHAM CARAVANSARIE.

And all around her, shapes, wizard and brute,

Laughing and wailing, grovelling, serpentine,

Showing tooth, tusk, and venom-bag, and sting!

O, such deformities!

Endymion.

In Barclay Street, New York, years ago, flourished, at No. 63, that famous caravansarie of all the most rabid wild animals on the Continent, who styled themselves Reformers and New-light People, Come-outers, Vegetarians, Abolitionists, Amalgamationists, &c. &c., well known to fame as the “Graham House.” Here, any fine morning, at the breakfast-table, you might meet a dozen or so of the most boisterous of the then existing or embryo Reform notorieties of the day. Mark, we say notorieties, for that is the word.

From the Meglatherium Oracle, whose monstrous head, covered with a mouldy excrescence, answering for hair, which gave it most the seeming of a huge swamp-born fungus of a night—who sat bolting his hard-boiled eggs by the dozen, with bran-bread in proportion, washing them down with pints of diluted parched-corn coffee—even to the most meagre, hungry-eyed, and talon-fingered of the soul-starved World-Reformers, that stooped forward amidst the babble, and, between huge gulps of hot meal mush, croaked forth his orphic words—they were all one and alike—the mutterers of myths made yet more misty by their parrot-mouthings of them!

Here every crude, ungainly crotchet that ever possessed ignorant and presumptuous brains; here every wild and unbroken hobby that ever driveller or madman rode, was urged together, pell-mell, in a loud-voiced gabbling chaos. Here the negro squared his uncouth and musky-ebon personalities beside the fair, frail form of some lean, rectangular-figured spinster-devotee of amalgamation from New England.

Here the hollow-eyed bony spectre of an old bran-bread disciple stared, in the grim ecstacy of anticipation, at the ruddy cheeks of the new convert opposite, whose lymphatic, well-conditioned corporation shivered with affright, as he met those ravin-lit eyes, and a vague sense of their awful meaning first possessed him, as his furtive glance took in the sterile “spread” upon the table, to which he had been ostentatiously summoned for “a feast.”

Here some Come-outer Quaker, with what had been, at best, cropped hair, might be seen with the crop now shaven yet more close to his bullet-head, in sign of his greater accession in spiritual strength beyond the heathen he had left behind, sitting side by side with some New-light or Phalanxterian apostle, with his long, sandy, carroty, or rather golden locks, as he chooses to style them, cultivated down his back in a ludicrously impious emulation of the revered “Christ Head” of the old Italian painters.

Here the blustering peace-man and professed non-resistant, railed with a noisy insolence, rendered more insufferably insulting in the precise ratio of exemption from personal accountability claimed by his pusillanimous doctrines. Here too, a notorious Abolitionist, with his tallow-skinned and generally-disgusting face, roared through gross lips his vulgar anathemas against the South, which had foolishly canonised this soulless and meddlesome non-resistant ruffian, in expressing their readiness to hang him, should he be caught within their territory.

Here the weak and puling sectary of some milk-and-water creed rolled up his rheumy eyes amidst the din, and sighed for horror of a “sad, wicked world.” Here the sharp animal eyes, the cool effrontery and hard-faced impudence of ignoramus Professors of all sorts of occult sciences, ologies, and isms, met you, with hungry glances that seemed searching for “the green” in your eye; and mingled with the whole, a sufficiently spicy sprinkle of feminine “Professors,” of the same class, whose bold looks and sensual faces were quite sufficient offsets to the extreme etherialisation of their spiritualized doctrines.

Here, in a word, the blank and ever-shocking glare of harmless and positive idiocy absolutely would escape notice at all, or be mistaken for the solid repose of common sense, in contrast with the unnatural sultry wildness of the prevailing and predominating expression!

But this menagerie of mad people held caged, in one of its upper rooms, the object of immediate interest. On entering the apartment, which was an ordinary boarding-house bedchamber, a scene at once shocking and startling was presented. A female, seemingly about thirty-three, was stretched upon a low cot-bed, near the middle of the floor, while on the bed and upon the floor were scattered napkins, which appeared deeply saturated with blood, with which the pillow-case and sheet were also stained. A napkin was pressed with a convulsive clutch of the hands to her mouth, into which, with a low, suffocating cough, which now and then broke the silence, she seemed to be throwing up quantities of blood from what appeared an alarming hemorrhage.

A gentleman, whose neat apparel and fresh benevolent face somehow spoke “physician!” leaned over the woman, with an expression of anxiety, which appeared to be subdued by great effort of a trained will. He bent lower, and in an almost whispered voice, said:

“My dear madam, you must restrain yourself. This hemorrhage continues beyond the reach of any remedies, so long as you permit this violent excitement of your maternal feelings to continue. Let me exhort you to patience—to bear the necessary evils of your unfortunate condition with more patience!”

The only answer was a slow despairing shake of the head, accompanied by a deep hysterical groan, which seemed to flood the napkin at her mouth with a fresh effusion of blood, which now trickled between her fingers and down upon her breast. The humane physician turned, with an uncontrollable expression of horrified sympathy and alarm upon his face, and snatching a clean napkin from the table, gently removed the saturated cloth from the clutching pressure of her fingers, and tenderly wiping the blood from her mouth and person, left the clean one in her grasp.

“Be calm! be calm—I pray you! you must some day escape his persecutions. You have friends; they will assist you to obtain a divorce yet, and rescue your child from his clutches. Do, pray now, be calm!” The voice of the good man trembled with emotion while he spoke, and the perspiration started from his forehead.

At this instant the door was suddenly thrown open, and a tall, gaunt man, with a very small round head, leaden eyes, and a wide ungainly mouth, with a projecting under jaw, singularly expressive of animal stolidity, paused on the threshold and coolly looked around the room. The woman sprang forward at the sight, as if to rise, while a fresh gush of blood poured from her mouth, bedabbling her fingers and the sheet. The physician instinctively seized her to prevent her rising, but, resisting the pressure by which he gently strove to restore her head to the pillow, she retained her half-erect position, and with eyes that had suddenly become strangely distorted, or awry in their sockets, she glared towards the intruder for an instant, and then slowly raising her flickering hand, which dripped with her own blood, she pointed at him, and muttered, in a sepulchral voice, that, besides, seemed choking:

“That is he! see him! see him! There stands the monster who would rob me of my babe, as he daily robs me of money.” Here the blood gushed up again, and she was for a moment suffocated into silence, as the object of her denunciation stood perfectly unmoved, while a cold smile half lit his leaden eyes. This seemed to fill the apparently dying woman with renewed and hysterical life. She raised herself yet more erect, and still pointing with her bloody, quivering finger, while her head tossed to and fro, and the distorted eyes glared staringly out before her, she spoke in a gasping, uncertain way, as if communing with herself. “The wretch taunts me! my murderer dares to sneer! O God! must this always continue? must that brute always follow me up and down in the land, to rob me of the money that I earn—to be my tyrant, my jailor! He will not give me money to pay postage even, out of that I earn abundantly, while he is earning nothing. He will not give me clothes to keep me decent, while I earn enough. He will not give my child shoes to wear, though he is trying to take her from me!”

“That is a lie, Etherial! you know I gave the child a new pair yesterday!” gruffly interposed the man at this stage of the deeply tragic soliloquy, while he stepped forward towards the bed. A choking scream followed, and the blood was spattered over the spread as she fell back screaming—

“Take him away! take him away! He is killing me with his brutality!” and then her head sank in sudden collapse upon the pillow, and the face, which had heretofore looked singularly natural in color, for one in such a dreadful strait from hemorrhage, turned livid pale, while the blood continued to pour upon the pillow from the corners of the relaxed mouth.

The poor physician, whose frame had been shivering with intense excitement during this interview, sprang erect, as the form of what he supposed to be a corpse fell heavily from his arms, and with the natural indignation of a feeling man, fully roused at what he considered the murderous brutality of the husband, rushed forward, and seizing him furiously by the collar, shook and choked him in a perfect ecstacy of rage, shouting, at the same time—

“Unnatural beast! monster! You have killed that poor child at last! murdered your own wife, whom you swore to nourish and protect! Infernal villain! you ought to be drawn and quartered—hanging is too good for you! You saw the terrible condition of the poor victim of your brutalities when you came, yet you persisted! In the name of humanity, I send you hence! Death is too light punishment for you!” and he hurled the unresisting wretch—who, by this time, had grown perfectly black in the face under the rough handling of this roused and indeed infuriate humanity—staggering out of the door—and closing it upon him, he proceeded to apply such restoratives as on an examination the real condition of the patient suggested.

A short and anxious investigation proved it to be rather a state of syncope than actual death; and, with a full return of all his professional caution, skill and coolness, he applied himself to the restoration of his patient, with a heart greatly relieved by the discovery that the result he so much dreaded was not yet, and hugging to his kindly breast the consolation “while there is life there is hope!” He paid no attention to clamorous knocks for admission and loud-talking excitement, which the violence of the preceding scene had no doubt caused in alarming the house. In a short time the good doctor cautiously unbolted the door and came forth from the room, treading as though on egg-shells. After leaving careful instructions with the landlady that his patient, who now slept, should under no pretence be disturbed, most especially by the husband, until his return, as her present repose might prove a matter of life and death, he left the house, promising to call again in two hours.

For one hour the woman lay calm and motionless on her gory bed, as if in catalepsy, when to a low, peculiar knock at the door, she sprang up, wide awake, and in the apparent full possession of her faculties.

“Who?” she asked, in a quick, firm tone, as she threw the hair back from her eyes.

To the low response, “I, love!” she stepped quickly from the bed and snatched a shawl from the back of a chair, and by several rapid sideway movements of her feet at the same time, thrust the bloody napkins which strewed the floor beneath the bed, where they would be out of sight, and by a movement almost as swift, threw a clean “spread” over the blood-stained pillows and sheet, then drawing her large shawl closely over the stained dressing-gown in which she had risen, she rushed first to the glass, and smoothed her hair with an activity that was positively amazing, and then to the door, which she unbolted on the inside—showing that she must have risen to bolt it immediately as the doctor passed out—and admitted a man who was in waiting.

“Ah, my soul’s sister! my Heaven-bride! how is thy spiritual strength this evening?” and at the same time, as her yielding form sank into his outspread arms, he pressed her lips with his, adding, “I salute thy chaste spirit!”

“Brother of my soul, I was weary, but now I am at rest. I was wounded and fainting by the way, but the good Samaritan has come!” and she turned her eyes upward to his with a melting expression of confiding abandon.

“Angel!” accompanied by a closer and convulsive clasp, was the response.

“What do they say of poor me again, to-day, those cruel wicked people outside?” she asked, with eyes still reverentially upraised to his, as they moved slowly with clasped arms towards the cot, on the side of which they sat, she still leaning against his bosom.

“My good sister, they say what evil spirits always prompt men to say of the good, who, like the Prophets, are sent to be stoned and persecuted on earth. You should not regard such. There are those who know you in the spirit, to whom it has been revealed through the spiritual sense, that you are good and true, as well as in the right, and through such, you will find strength of the Father.”

“Oh, you are so strong in spiritual mightiness that you do not sympathise with the weaknesses of we humbler mortals! I wonder, indeed, how you can forgive them?” and her downcast eyes were furtively raised to his. The man wore his hair thrown back over his head and behind his ears. He drew himself up slightly at this, and stroked back his locks, then placing his hand with patriarchal solemnity upon her bowed head, proceeded in a somewhat louder tone. “My simple child—my soul-sister, I should say, you are hardly upon the threshold of the true wisdom. Your knowledge of the law of spiritual correspondence is yet too incomplete for you to understand how entirely good has been mistaken for evil, and evil confounded with good in the world. For instance—it is called evil by the ignorant world, for a brother man to caress thee in the spirit as I have caressed thee but now. The imaginations of a world that lieth in evil are impure. ‘Evil to him who evil thinks!’ The great doctrine of correspondence teaches that there are two lives—the spiritual and the animal. The passions of the animal are in the fleshly lusts; those of the spiritual are in no wise such, they are in the Heavenly sphere, they are of love and wisdom. Thus, my caress in this Heavenly sphere is of no sin to thee, for by and through it I convey to you, my spiritual sister, the strength of love and wisdom for which your heart yearns. Thus—”

As he stooped his head to renew the unresisted caress, the door flew open again, and the man with the wide mouth, the hideous chin and the leaden eye, stood again upon the threshold, and as the affrighted pair looked up they saw he was backed by the curious faces of half-a-dozen chambermaids, jealous of the honor of the house, flanked by the indignant landlady and a score of prying, curious, sharp-eyed faces, which might be recognised at a glance as belonging to those pickled seraphs of reform, known as “free-spoken” spinsters in New England.

“There, they are at it!” shouted the man with the gaping mouth. “I told you so! I told you that Professor was always kissing her!”

“Yes!”

“There they are, sure enough!”

“I always thought so!”

“The honor of my house!” bristled the landlady, striding forward. “I did not expect this of you, Professor!”

“Madam!” said the gentleman with his hair behind his ears, striding forward as he released the suddenly collapsed and seemingly lifeless form he had just held within his embrace, and which fell back now heavily upon the pillow-spread, which was instantly discolored by a new gush of blood from the mouth. “I was administering, with all my zeal, spiritual comfort to this poor, sick and dying sister, when you burst in! See her condition now!”

He waved his hand towards the tragic figure. “The Professor” occupied a parlor on the first floor, beside two bed-rooms adjoining this, and being on the palmy heights of his renown and plenitude of purse, it was not convenient for the landlady to quarrel with him at present. “Ah, if that is the case, Professor, I beg you to pardon us. The husband of this woman has misrepresented you and your beneficent motives, and accuses you of all sorts of improprieties. We came up, at his urgency, to see for ourselves, and the shocking condition in which we find her now, proves that the ravings of the husband are, as she has always represented them, insane.”

“I’ve seen you kissing her before!” roared the husband, advancing threateningly upon the Professor, who, however spiritual in creed, did not now appear particularly spirited, as he turned very pale, retreated backwards, and holding up his two trembling hands imploringly, exclaimed—“Hold! hold! my dear brother! It was a spiritual kiss! I meant you no harm, nor that angel who lies there dying! Our kiss was pure and holy as the new snow. Hold him! hold him! Don’t let him hurt me! I am a non-resistant! I am for peace!”

“Your holy kisses! I don’t believe in your holy kisses!” gnashed the enraged husband, still following him up with warlike demonstrations; but here the easily appeased landlady interposed once more, to save the honor of her house in preventing a fight.

“No blows in my house!” she shrieked, as she threw herself between the parties. “The Professor is a man of God, and shall not be abused here; shame on you, Aminadab, with your poor, persecuted wife there, dying before your face! Everybody will believe what she says about your persecutions now!”

“Bah, you don’t know that woman! she’s no more dying than you are!” grunted the fellow, whose wrath fortunately seemed to be of that kind that a straw might turn it aside. All the women rolled up their eyes and lifted their two hands at this speech.

“What a brute!”

“The horrid, murdering wretch! and she bleeding at the mouth, and from the lungs, too!”

“Lord save the poor woman’s soul, with a husband like that!”

And other speeches of like character were ejaculated by all the women present.

At this moment a fresh effusion of blood, accompanied by a low groan, from the mouth of the suffering patient, flooded the clean spread with its purple current, and the horrified females rushed from the room, screaming—

“He’s killed her at last, poor thing!”

“Where’s the doctor?”

“She’s dying of his brutality—run for the doctor!” At this moment, with a hasty and heavy step, that gentleman was heard advancing along the passage, followed by a crowd of pale, frightened-looking women. He strode into the room.

“What now?—what’s to pay?” and his eye fell on the trembling form of the brutal husband, who had by no means forgotten the rough handling he had received, and now skulked and quailed like a whipped cur, as his eye saw the instant thunder darken on the brow of the doughty doctor.

“You here again—you brutal fellow? I shall instantly bind you over to keep the peace toward this unfortunate woman, whose life you are daily endangering by your brutalities. Take yourself off, sir!” Aminadab waited for no second invitation, but availed himself of the open doorway.

Without noticing the spiritual professor, who had drawn himself into as small space as possible in one corner, the good man advanced to the side of his patient with an anxious, flurried manner.

“What can that besotted wretch have been doing to her again?” and he gently placed his fingers upon her pulse, and shook his head gravely as he did so.

“Very low! very low, indeed!—nearly absolute syncope again! This is horrible! How sorry I am that I was compelled to leave her for a moment.”

“Is she really in danger, doctor?” asked the spiritual professor, advancing with recovered assurance.

“Who are you, sir?” he said, looking up sharply. “One of these officious fools, I suppose?” Then glancing his eye around at the crowded doorway, he straightened himself hastily, and exclaimed—

“Leave the room, all of you—she must be quiet—I wish to be alone with my patient! Leave the room, sir, I say!” in a sterner voice, as the spiritual professor hesitated on his backward retreat.

“I—I—I p-pro-test against the impropriety!” he stammered forth, looking back at the women, with a very pale face, as he accelerated his backward movement before the steady stride of the resolute doctor.

“Out with you, sir—I will answer for the proprieties in this case!”

The door was slammed in the ashy face of the spiritual professor, and securely doubled-locked before the doctor returned to the bedside of his patient.

The bleeding from the mouth had now ceased. All the usual remedies in such cases having so far entirely failed, the puzzled doctor had come to the final conclusion that the hemorrhage—be its seat where it might—was only to be subdued by a restoration of the patient to the most perfect repose. Sleep, calm, unbroken sleep, to his sagacious judgment and sensibilities, seemed to offer the sole alternative to death. He had been impressed by his patient that her constitutional tendencies were, by a sad inheritance, towards consumption, and the loss from the lungs, of such quantities of blood as he had witnessed, was well calculated to fill his professional mind with horror and dread. The case had thus appeared to him a fearfully uncertain and delicate one, and this sense may fully account for the stern and unusual procedure of turning even the husband out of the room on the two occasions we have mentioned.

As her physician, he felt himself bound to protect his helpless patient against those moral causes of irritation which he had been led to believe existed, not only from her reluctant disclosures, but from what he had himself witnessed. Believing that her beastly husband was the chief and immediate cause of this fatal irritation, he had felt himself justified in his rough course towards him, and was now fully and resolutely determined to protect what he considered a death-bed—providentially thrown into his charge—inviolate from farther annoyance, from whatever quarter, at least so long as he held the professional responsibility. In this resolute feeling, and as the day was warm, he threw off his coat, raised all the windows, and sat himself quietly down beside his patient to watch for results.

The eyes of the kind man very naturally rested upon the object of his solicitude, and after the first excitement of anxiety was over, and he had settled calmly into a contemplative mood, he first became conscious that there was something strangely fascinating in the position of the nearly inanimate figure. He had never before thought of the being before him as other than a very plain, but much-afflicted woman, by whose evident physical calamities, no less than her private sufferings, he had been strongly interested.

She had told him her own story, and he had believed her, thinking he saw confirmation enough in the conduct of those she accused of ill-treatment; but the idea of regarding her as attractive in any material sense, had never for an instant crossed his pure soul. Now there was an indescribable something in her attitude, so expressive of passion, that, in the pulseless silence, he felt himself blush to have recognised it.

Her arms, which he now remembered to have been bare in all his late interviews with her, were exquisitely rounded and beautifully white, and he could not but wonder that he had not before observed the strange contrast between them and the plain weather-beaten face. They looked startlingly voluptuous now, contrasted with the pallid cheek which rested on them, and the glossy folds of dark hair in which they were entangled. So strikingly indeed was this expression conveyed, that even the purple stains of blood upon the spread beneath would not divest him of the dangerous illusion. The good doctor felt the blood mount to his forehead in the shame of deep humiliation as he recognised in himself this wandering of thought.

What! could it be that one so habitually pure in feeling as he, could permit the intrusion at such an hour of impure associations? Such things were unknown to his life, so disinterested, so spotless, so humane. What could it be that had caused such feelings to possess him thus unusually? It could not be possible she was conscious of the position in which her body was thrown. Was there some strange spell about this woman—some mysterious power of sphere emanating from that still form, that crept into his blood and brain with the evil glow of these unnatural fires?

The poor doctor shuddered as he turned aside from the bed, and, with a soft step, glided to the window, and there seating himself, strove to recover the command of his thoughts by distracting them with other objects in the busy street.

The good man was on grievous terms with himself, as he continued to beat the devil’s tattoo on the window-sill with his heavy fingers. He felt alarmed, nay, even guilty. He knew not why. We shall see!

CHAPTER III.
THE SYREN AND THE MOB.

And after all the raskal many ran,

Heaped together in rude rabblement.

Spenser.

What intricate impeach is this?—

I think you all have drunk of Circe’s cup!

Shakspeare.

The woman continued, with calm, regular breathings, to sleep for several hours. The dusk of evening had now closed in, and yet her patient guardian sat silently watching her motionless figure. A long and serene self-communion had gradually restored the excellent doctor to his ordinary equanimity, and he now, with untiring vigilance, awaited the changes that might supervene in the condition of the patient.

After all his thinking on the subject, he found himself now no nearer comprehending the cause of the late unwonted disturbance of his habitual serenity than at the beginning. He had dealt harshly with himself, in endeavoring to account for it, and never dreamed of reproaching the feeble and wretched being before him, as in any degree the conscious agent of what he considered a weakness unpardonable in himself.

With the natural proclivity of generous souls towards the extremes, he had, in the plenitude of his self-reproach, proceeded to exalt the sleeping woman into an earth-visiting angel with wounded wings, the spotless purity of which the breath of his darkened thought had soiled. The poor, good-hearted doctor!

The silence of the room was now broken by a low exclamation of fright, accompanied by a slight movement of the patient. The doctor sprang forward softly to the bedside.

“Who?—what?—where am I? What has been happening?” asked the woman, with an expression of bewilderment and alarm.

“Nothing! nothing, my dear madam! I am here—you are safe—but you must not talk.”

“Where is he? is he gone?” she persisted in a wild, terrified manner.

“Yes, he is gone. He shall not come back to disturb you again. You must be quiet now, and get well. Please be calm, and trust in me.”

“Trust in thee?” said the patient, in a voice which had instantly lost its vague tone. “Trust in thee, thou minister of light, who hast come to my darkened pillow, to my bloody death-bed, to console me!” and here she clutched his hand. “Trust thee—I would trust thee as I trust God!” and she pressed his hand to her heart.

“You must be silent, madam,” urged the physician, endeavoring to extricate his imprisoned hand, for he felt strange tinglings along his veins, which alarmed his now penitent and vigilant spirit. She only shook her head, and clung with yet greater tenacity to his hand, and then, first raising it to her lips with a reverential kiss, she placed it upon the top of her head, with the palm outstretched, and signified her desire that he should keep it there, with a smile of entire beatitude. The doctor barely knew enough of mesmeric manipulations, to understand that this laying-on of hands was commonly resorted to among the believers in the science, as a remedy for nervous headache. He could see no harm in the innocent formula, if it assisted the imagination in throwing off pain, and he very willingly humored his poor patient, in permitting his hand to remain there.

In a moment or two a singular change came over the face and general physical expression of the woman, and the doctor, who had witnessed something of mesmeric phenomena, instantly recognised this as clearly presenting all the symptoms of such a case. He had mesmerised her by a touch, and it was not without a thrill of vague wonder that he awaited further developments.

There was a perfect silence of ten minutes’ duration, when the mesmerised patient began moving her lips as if in the effort to articulate. The curiosity of the doctor was now fully aroused—his will became concentrated—he desired to hear her speak; in his unconscious eagerness, he willed that she should do so with all the energy of his firm nature; and speak she did.

“Happy! happy! Ah, I am content in this pure sphere! My soul can rest here!” a long pause, then suddenly a shudder vibrated through her frame, and she shrank back as one appalled by some spectral horror.

“Ha! it is all dark now! I see! I see! his hand is red! red! red! red! There is murder on this soul!”

The doctor sprang up and back as if he had been shot. His face grew livid pale, and he trembled in every joint, while with chattering teeth he stammered—

“Woman! Woman, how know you this?”

“I see it there—that huge red hand! Now all is red! There! there! I felt it must be so! The pale and golden light breaks through! It spreads! It fills and covers everything! His heart did no murder—it was his hand! He can be redeemed! This soul is pure!”

The poor doctor sank upon his chair and groaned heavily, while he covered his face with his hands. He spoke, in a few moments, in an almost inaudible tone, to himself, while the woman, who had suddenly opened her eyes, turned her head slightly, and watched him with a sharp attention.

“Alas! alas! how came this strange being in possession of the fatal secret of my life? I believed it buried in the oblivion of thirty years. My life of dedication to humanity, since, I thought might have atoned for that quick sad deed! Yes! I struck him! O, my God—I struck him! but the provocation was most fearful! Woman, who and what are you, that you should know this thing?” and with a vehement gesture he jerked his hands from before his eyes, and turning swiftly upon her, he met the keen, still glance of those watchful eyes, which shone through the subdued light of the room, steadily upon him. The doctor was astounded! He sprang to his feet again, exclaiming angrily—

“What shallow trick is this? You seemed but now in the mesmeric sleep, and mouthed to me concerning my past life, and here you are, wide awake! How came you with the secrets of my life?”

The woman answered feebly, and with a sob that at once touched the gentle-hearted doctor, and turned aside his wrath—

“You took your hand away—you would not let me speak. Place your hand upon my head again, and I will tell you all.”

The troubled doctor re-seated himself with a shuddering reluctance, and renewed the manipulation.

In a few moments she appeared again to have sank into the sleep, and commenced in that slow, fragmentary manner supposed to be peculiar to such conditions:

“I see! The dark shadow is on this soul again! It is of anger and suspicion—they are both evil spirits! They strive to make it wrong the innocent! It is too holy and pure to yield! I see the golden light fill all again! The bloody hand is gone. No stain of crime remains upon this soul. It will be pardoned of God. This soul needs only human love. Through love it can be made free before God! All the past will be forgiven then—the red stains will fade! A sudden anger made it sin. Love can only intercede for this sin. Love will intercede! It will be saved!”

Here her voice became subdued into indistinct mutterings, and the doctor drew a long breath as he withdrew his hand—

“Singular woman! How could all this have been revealed to her? She must commune with spirits in this state. My story is not known to any here. I never saw or heard of her, until sent for as a physician, to visit her in this house. Strange that this fearfully passionate and repented deed should thus rise up in my path, thousands of miles away, amidst strangers, who can know nothing of me! Oh, my God! my God! Thou art indeed vengeful and just!” and the miserable man clasped his hands before his eyes and moaned. “It was my first draught of love and life. He dashed it! I was delirious in my joy, while the beams rained from her eyes into my hungry soul—hungry of beauty and of bliss. He dashed it all, and in the hot blood of my darkened madness I slew him! Oh, I slew him! His shadow, that can never be appeased, though I have given body, and soul, and substance, to relieving the sufferings of my race since that unhappy hour—it rises here again! It haunts me! Yes! yes! I feel that love alone can make me strong once more, to bear such tortures! But have I not denied myself such dreams? Have I not with dedicated heart walked humbly since in self-denying ways? Have I not clothed the orphan, fed the poor and nursed the sick? Have I not ministered amidst pestilence, and held my life as of none account that I might bring good to others? Can I be forgiven? No! no! The Pharisee recounts his holy deeds and thanks God that his life is not sinful as another man! I am not to be forgiven! I shall never know those dreams of love!”

The strong man bowed his frame and shook with agony. Could he but have looked up, a keen, quick gleam from the eyes which had been so steadily fixed upon him during this painful soliloquy, would have struck him as conveying the ecstacy of a sainted spirit over a soul repentant—or of some other feeling quite as exultant.

This curious scene was, however, most unexpectedly interrupted at this moment, by a loud yelling from the street below. The clamor was so sudden, and yet so angrily harsh, that both parties sprang forward in the alarm it caused—the woman, springing up into a sitting posture on the bed, and the doctor to go to the window.

“What is it?” she exclaimed wildly, as she tossed back her hair. “What do these cruel people want to do to me now?”

The doctor, who saw at a glance the meaning of what was going on below, and the necessity of keeping his patient cool, turned to her, with a very quiet expression—

“Do not be alarmed, madam. It is merely some disorderly gathering of rowdies, in the street below. There is no danger to you—only do not get excited, or you will bleed again. I am here to protect you.”

“Then I am safe!” was the fervid response, which, however, was followed by a roar so sullen and portentous, from the infuriated mob underneath, as to leave some doubt of its truth even upon the mind of the doctor.

“Down with the amalgamation den!”

“Down with the saw-dust palace!”

“Tear it down!”

“Let’s lynch the wretches!”

The response to speeches of this sort, from single voices, would be a simultaneous burst of approbation from the great crowd, and a trampling and rush to get nearer the building. It seemed a formidable sight, indeed, to the doctor, as he looked down upon this living mass of men, surging like huge waves tossed against some cliff, while the torches, that many of them bore, glared fitfully upon the upturned, angry faces.

A powerful voice, which rose above all the tumult, exclaimed with a hoarse oath, as the speaker turned for an instant towards the crowd, from the top of the front steps—

“Let us burst open the door and lynch every white person found with a negro. Here goes for the door!” and he threw himself furiously against it, while a perfect thunder-crash of roars attested the approbation of the dangerous mob. The door resisted for a moment, when there was a sudden yell from the outside of the mob, nearly a square distant—

“Here! here’s what’ll do it! pass ’em on!” and the alarmed doctor saw immediately the portentous gleam of fire-axes, which were being passed over the heads of the crowd towards the door, and in another instant the crash of the cutting would commence. The doctor, as we have seen, was a very prompt man. He thrust his head out of the window, and in a loud, commanding voice, shouted—

“Stop!”

The man at the door, who had just received the axe, and was in the act of wielding it, paused for an instant, to look up, while the whole sea of faces was raised toward the window, amidst a moment’s silence, of which the doctor instantly availed himself—

“Gentlemen, do you war upon women? I have a female patient here, in this room, at the point of death! If you proceed, you will kill her!”

“Who is she?” shouted some one, while another voice, in a derisive tone, yelled out amidst screams of laughter—

“Is she Rose? Rose? de coal-brack Rose? I wish I may be shot if I don’t lub Rose!”

Amidst the thunders which followed, some one shouted from a distant part of the mob, to the man with the axe—

“Go on, Jim! It’s all pretence with their sick women!”

“Down with the door—they don’t escape us that way! Look out for your bones, old covey, when we catch you!”

The axe was again swung back, but the doughty doctor still persisted—

“Stop!” he shouted again, in a tone so startling for energy of command, that the axe was again lowered.

“Are you Americans? Have you mothers and sisters?”

“Yes, but they ain’t black gals!” gibed one of the mob, and set the rest into a roar once again.

“I appeal to you as men—as brothers and fathers, do not murder my poor patient!”

“Who is that noisy fellow?” bellowed a brutal voice below.

“I am a physician! I have nothing to do with this house or its principles; I only beg to be permitted to save my patient!”

“What is your name, I say?” bellowed the hoarse man again. “Out with it! We’ll know you—some of us!”

The name was mentioned. There was a momentary pause, and a low murmur ran through the crowd; then shout after shout of applauding huzzas.

“We know you!”

“Just like him!”

“Noble fellow!”

“The good doctor! Huzza! huzza!”

And so the cry went up on all sides, for the doctor’s reputation for benevolence was as wide as that of John Jacob Astor for the opposite trait.

There seemed to be a vehement consultation among what appeared the leaders of the mob, which lasted but for a moment or two, when one who stood upon the top step looked up, and in a firm, respectful voice, said to the doctor—

“It’s all right, sir, about you! We shall let the women pass out! But you must clear the house of them!”

“But it is dangerous to move my patient.”

“We cannot help that, doctor; we do this for your sake, not theirs, for they ought every one of them to be burned, and we are determined to abate the nuisance of this house. So hurry them along here quick, for the boys will not keep quiet long.”

“Yes, hurry them women along; we’ll let them go this time.”

“All but that lecturing lady (?), who says that she would as soon marry a negro as a white man!”

“Yes, all but her; we want to be rid of such creatures; let’s duck her in the Hudson.”

“No, boys, we will make no distinction. We have promised—let the woman go.”

“Down with the lecturing women and their black lovers!”

“Duck the hag! we’ll wash off the scent for her!”

Cries such as these convinced the doctor that indeed no time was to be lost, particularly as the sound of the axe was now heard below in good earnest. Approaching the bed hastily, he took the shivering form of the panic-stricken woman, who had heard distinctly these last ominous cries, into his arms. She clutched him with a desperate grip, while he hurried down the stairs.

On the way, he met the Spiritual Professor in the passage, surrounded by the women of the house, who were clustered about him, in the seemingly vain hope of obtaining from him something of that ethereal consolation and strength, of which he was the so much vaunted Professor. Indeed, he himself now seemed the most woful, of all the whimpering, terrified group, in want of any kind of strength, whether spiritual or otherwise; and his teeth literally chattered, as he clutched at the doctor’s passing arm.

“Wh—wh—what shall we do? They mean to burn the house, don’t they?”

“Do?” said the doctor, sternly, shaking off his grasp. “Try and be a man, if you’ve got it in you! Get these women out of the house, and take yourself off on your spiritual legs as fast as you can, or you may make some ugly acquaintances.”

The Professor still clung to his skirts.

“Oh Lord! the doctrine of correspondences does not sanction—”

“Go to the devil, with your correspondence, or I shall kick you out of my path!” roared the angry doctor, while the snivelling Professor, more alarmed than ever, slunk aside to let him pass. The crash and clatter from below now announced that the mob had effected an entrance from the street, and leaving the women, all screaming at the top of their lungs, around their doughty spiritual guide, he rushed on with his burden towards the front entrance, which had thus been taken by storm, and was now rapidly filling with excited men. Some were seizing the furniture, which they began to demolish, while others hurried forward to intercept him.

“It is the sick woman. Remember your promise; let me pass.”

“Yes, that’s the good doctor; let him pass, boys.”

“No, not yet!” roared a burly-looking ruffian, pressing through the throng. “We must see who it is he has got there. Who is she?” and he roughly dragged aside the shawl that partially covered her face.

“Monster!” shouted the excited doctor, “the woman is dying! Make way! Let me pass!”

“Not so fast!” said the ruffian, resisting his forward rush. “I shall see! I shall see! Boys, here she is! By G—d, this is she, that lecture-woman; she wants to marry a nigger, hah! We won’t let her go.”

“But you will!” said the doctor, releasing one arm, with which he struck the ruffian directly in the mouth, and with a force that sent him reeling backwards.

“Good! good!” shouted twenty voices; “served him right, doctor.”

The fellow had rallied instantly, and was rushing, like a wild bull, headlong upon the doctor, when several powerful men threw themselves between the two, seizing the ruffian at the same time.

“No, Jim, you stand back!” said one of them, brandishing a heavy axe before his eyes. “You touch that gentleman again, and I’ll brain you!”

“It’s a shame!” interposed others. “It’s the good doctor who nurses the poor for nothing. Doubt if he gets a cent for that creature.”

“Yes, if she was the devil’s dam herself, we promised the good man to let her go. Stand back, boys, and let the doctor pass.”

An opening was accordingly formed, through which the doctor hastened to make his way. When he made his appearance at the door, he was greeted with three wild, hearty cheers for himself, and as many groans and hisses for the character of the woman whom he bore, the news of the identification of whom had instantly found its way to the outside.

Regardless of all this, and only congratulating himself upon the prospect of getting his patient off alive, he pressed rapidly through the crowd, with the purpose of bearing her to the shelter of his own bachelor home.

The mob now instantly occupied the building, which was gutted by them, and the shattered contents, along with its occupants, men and women, roughly hurled into the street. Some of the former were very severely handled, and among the rest, the Spiritual Professor had his share of material chastening. The mob found him under a cot-bed, with three or four feminine disciples of his spiritual correspondences piled over him, or clinging distractedly to his nerveless limbs.

They dragged him out by the heels, with his squalling cortege trailing after him, and finding that the occult professor of spiritualities had gone into a state of obliviousness, or rather fainted, they proceeded, in their solicitude for his recovery, to deluge his person with sundry convenient slops, which shall be nameless, and afterwards kicked him headlong into the street below, where the screaming boys pelted him with gutter-mud and rotten eggs, until, finding his spiritual legs, as he had been advised—it is to be supposed—of a sudden, he made himself scarce, down Barclay Street, in an inappreciable twinkle.

In a word, the people, in this instance, as in many others, when they have found it necessary to take the laws of decency and common sense into their own sovereign hands, did the work of ridding themselves of this most detestable nuisance effectually. The Graham House was broken up, and although the pestilent nest of knaves and fools who most delighted there to congregate, have endeavored, in subsequent years, to reassemble, and renew the ancient character of the place as their head-quarters, yet the attempt has only been attended with partial success.

The blow was too decisive on this night; for, although the walls were left standing, the proprietor was given clearly to understand, that the unnatural orgies of amalgamation would not be tolerated again by the community, under the decisive penalty of no one stone left standing upon the other, of the building.

He took the hint, and it was about time! It has been fairly conjectured by this time, from the glimpses we have taken of the interior, that the house was the scene of other vices than those implied in amalgamation merely. It will be seen in yet other words and years how much there was of real danger to the well-being of society, in the doctrines taught and practised within its unhallowed walls. No one lesson could ever prove sufficient for these people; they enjoy a fatal impunity even now, and we shall endeavor that men shall know them as they are!

CHAPTER IV.
BOANERGES PHOSPHER, THE SPIRITUAL PROFESSOR.

He strikes no coin, ’tis true, but coins new phrases,

And vends them forth as knaves vend gilded counters,

Which wise men scorn, and fools accept in payment.

SHAKESPEARE.

None of these rogues and cowards, but Ajax is their fool!

Idem.

That the world has dealt hardly by its heroes, is a truism we need not insist upon at this late day. But whether the world knows who its heroes are, is another question, and one more open to controversy. Now I insist that the world does not know, or else Boanerges Phospher, the Spiritual Professor, would long since have been stoned and persecuted into one of the holy company of saints and martyrs!

There are several kinds of heroism heretofore known among men. There is the fierce, aggressive heroism of the soldier and conqueror—there is the “glib and oily” heroism of the politician—the calm, enduring heroism of the saint—the lofty, death-defying heroism of the patriot; but it remains for modern times to record the brazen heroism of impudence. Impudence, too, has its grades and degrees—its ancient types and its more modern ones—but as they all veil their brassy splendors, merging their separate rays in the central effulgence of our spiritual Colossus, we shall waive their particular enumeration in favor of the individualised impersonation of them all.

Ah, verily—and this is he!—our Spiritual Professor! Born in Yankee-land, of course, the earliest feat of Boanerges Phospher—literally, according to his own account of it—was to pry up a huge stone upon one of the sterile paternal acres: for what purpose, would you suppose? To place his feet upon the soil beneath, because the foot of no other man could have pressed it!

A laudable ambition, truly, but one which, somehow, unluckily, suggests that

“Fools may walk where angels fear to tread!”

It was a necessary sequence to the career of this modern Columbus of untrodden discovery, that we find his “first appearance upon any stage” to have been, while so pitiably ignorant as to be barely able to read his own language by spelling the words, and write his own name execrably, as Professor of Elocution!

Admirable! admirable! Why make two bites of a cherry? Why not step at once where no foot of such man ever trod before?

Shade of Blair! Look ye not askance at this daring intruder upon your classic company! He intends you no harm; he only means to re-fuse his brass back into copper s!

In lecturing on Elocution, our Professor, of necessity, gradually learned to read—with fluency, we mean—that is, he could “talk right eout,” like the head boy in a class, though it was in a nasal sing-song, more remarkable for its pietistic intonation than its rhythm. This was, no doubt, in a great measure owing to the facility of whining he had acquired, in his more juvenile experience, as a preacher of some three or four different liberal sects. We class these as mere experiments, as purely preliminary trials of strength, before he entered the true arena of his professorship.

The professorship, to be sure, was self-instituted—self-ordained—and why not self-asserted? There were professors of hair-invigorating oils, professors of dancing, professors of rat-catching, professors of hair-eradication, professors of cough-candy, professors of commercial book-keeping and running-hand writing, professors of flea-powder and bug-extermination—and why not a professor of elocution? The very gutter-mud germinates professors in this free country! They grow like fungi out of wallowing reptiles’ heads; and who need be surprised, in America, at receiving the card of his boot-black, inscribed Professor Brush; his chimney-sweep, Professor Soot; or be appalled by the bloody apparition of a missive from his butcher, emblazoned, “Professor Keyser, Killer!”

No disrespect, mark you, is intended to be either understood or implied, for the gentlemen of the various professions above enumerated, for they are all respectable in their way, and to be respected, outside of their professorships. But that is rather a serious name, as we understand it—one that the world has been accustomed to look up to with veneration—proportioned, until these “modern instances,” to the vast and profound learning which had made it, in the old world, the synonyme of almost patriarchal inspiration—the grand, firm, and stable bulwark of human progress, and its lofty future; of infinite science, and its clear, glorious myths!

This thing of learning seems so easy, that your starveling Yankee perceives no difficulties in the way, and glides into its penetralia “like a book,”—only that he never reads it! He is at once at home in all topography, as much as if he were in Kamtschatka, or the “Tropic Isles.” Furred cloaks or breadfruit leaves are all the same to him; he was born knowing, and of course could not do less than know a great deal more about Kamtschatka and the “Tropic Isles” than their furred and fig-leaved denizens. Brass is the Yankee’s capital, and no wonder they made the great discoveries of copper on Lake Superior, so extensively patronised by New-light sages. It is the offset to California gold; for, while one promises an infinite supply of the substantial basis of commerce and all trade, the other promises to furnish, in perpetuity, the crude material of impudence.

We mean no insinuation in regard to the Spiritual Professor, however much he may have had to do, by “spherical influence,” in precipitating the discovery of this great mine of the metal so much in favor with the sages above mentioned—and the remainder of the sect to which the Professor belonged—the motto of which is, that, “Out of the mouths of babes and sucklings shall ye be confounded.” Yet we can freely venture to assert, that he had no connection whatever with those unfortunate commercial results, which, in the first place, nearly, if not entirely, swamped the great Patron of the enterprise. The mind of our Professor was necessarily not of that vast reach and generalising comprehension, which could lead to the Behemoth stride and wizard calculation of results, which had enabled his master thus confidently to speculate in so subtle a material.

The operations of our Professor were essentially minified; that is, their sphere and scope had been particularly narrow. He was heroic enough, Heaven knows; but then his heroism was of that dashing character which only required a patron to illustrate and make it known.

Having published a book upon this occult (in his hands) science of elocution, which was, of course, written for him by another party, he suddenly felt himself inspired with a new inspiration.