Every one remembers the curious incident in regard to Lord Thomas Lyttleton’s vision, as related in Boswell’s “Johnson,” predicting the time of his death, and its exact fulfilment; and Johnson’s solemn comments thereon. “It is the most extraordinary thing that has happened in my day. I heard it with my own ears from his uncle, Lord Westcote.” Lord Byron once observed that several remarkable things had happened on his birthday, as they also had to Napoleon. Marie Antoinette, too, was a firm believer in these presentiments. She thus declares herself in language that now seems prophetic: “At my wedding something whispered to me that I was signing my death warrant. At the last moment I would have retreated if I could have done so.” Our early New England historian, Winthrop, mentions a singular case of presentiment of death, experienced by one Baker, of Salem. This man, on going forth to his work, in the morning, told his wife he should never see her more. He was killed by a stick of timber, falling upon him, that same day. It is quite true that we do not attach nearly as much importance to events happening a long time ago as to those occurring in our own day; for one thing, perhaps, because they do not seem so easy of verification; for another, because we choose to believe that they merely reflect the ignorance of a past age. That there is really no difference in the susceptibility of man to such premonitions, so long as he shall be the creature of feeling, is proved by the most irrefragable testimony. The poet Whittier, who took a peculiar delight in the legendary tales of New England, has related one or two incidents that came within his own knowledge, to this effect. “A very honest and intelligent neighbor of mine,” says the narrator, “once told me that at the precise moment when his brother was drowned in the Merrimack River, many miles distant, he felt a sudden and painful sensation--a death-like chill upon the heart, such as he had never before experienced. And,” adds the poet, “I have heard many similar relations.”