Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Vol. 3, No. 15, August, 1851Various
General
Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Vol. 3, No. 15, August, 1851
Various
American literature -- Periodicals; Civilization -- Periodicals; Culture -- Periodicals
"After the prayer, she lay for some time silent and motionless;
affording space, as some supposed, for the singing of a hymn, as in the
regular exercises of the sanctuary. Then she began her discourse, which
usually continued about half an hour. It was not a discourse from any
particular text, although it was connected, regular, and nobly
illustrated by the most apposite quotations from the Bible. If
interrupted by any questions, she would pause, make answer, and
immediately resume the broken chain of her remarks. The evening I was
present, a distinguished clergyman of this city, who had come expressly
to visit her, interrupted her with:
"'Rachel, why do you consider yourself called upon to address your
fellow-sinners, and by what authority do you speak.'
"'I even I,' she answered, 'a woman of the dust, am moved by the SPIRIT
which liveth and moveth all things. Necessity is laid upon me; for I
speak through HIM who hath said, "Upon my young men and maidens will I
pour out my Spirit, and the young men shall see visions and the young
maidens dream dreams."' The passage quoted was to this purport. Although
the somnambulist was utterly ignorant of correct language, never
speaking, when awake, without the grossest blunders in grammar, yet in
all passages and discourses which she delivered in her somnambulent
state, in all the answers to questions which were propounded to her she
never committed the slightest error. I wish I could remember a passage
of her discourse the second night I heard her. It was replete with the
most admirable imagery, and its pathos was infinitely touching. She was
visited at the house of Mr. G---- by some of the most eminent clergymen
and _savans_ of New York, and other cities; among others, if I remember
rightly, by the celebrated Dr. SAMUEL L. MITCHELL. After her discourse
was finished, she would be silent and motionless, as before she began
it, then pronounce a prayer; and at last relapse into a disturbed
slumber, from which she would gradually arouse, groaning as if in pain,
her hands relaxing and falling by her side, and her frame trembling as
if 'rent with mortal agony.'
"Her somnambulism continued for some two or three months afterward; all
physical remedies were tried, but without avail. She died in about a
year afterward, her case baffling to the last all attempts at
explanation of the mysterious agency by which it was produced."
* * * * *
DR. OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES tells us how the members of the medical
profession feel when the "poison-chalice" of their prescriptions is
commended to their own lips; in other words, when the visitor becomes
the visitee:
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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