The Night-Side of Nature; Or, Ghosts and Ghost-SeersCrowe, Catherine
Religion
The Night-Side of Nature; Or, Ghosts and Ghost-Seers
Crowe, Catherine
Ghosts; Parapsychology
A friend of mine, Mr. Charles Kirkpatrick Sharpe, has some coins that
were found exactly in the same manner. The child of a Mr. Christison, in
whose house his father was lodging, in the year 1781, dreamed that there
was a treasure hid in the cellar. Her father had no faith in the dream;
but Mr. Sharpe had the curiosity to have the place dug up, and a copper
pot was found, full of coins.
A very singular circumstance was related to me by Mr. J——, as having
occurred not long since to himself. A tonic had been prescribed to him
by his physician, for some slight derangement of the system, and as
there was no good chemist in the village he inhabited, he was in the
habit of walking to a town about five miles off, to get the bottle
filled as occasion required. One night, that he had been to M—— for
this purpose, and had obtained his last supply, for he was now
recovered, and about to discontinue the medicine, a voice seemed to warn
him that some great danger was impending, his life was in jeopardy; then
he heard, but not with his outward ear, a beautiful prayer. “It was not
myself that prayed,” he said, “the prayer was far beyond anything I am
capable of composing—it spoke of me in the third person, always as
_he_; and supplicated that for the sake of my widowed mother this
calamity might be averted. My father had been dead some months. I was
sensible of all this, yet I can not say whether I was asleep or awake.
When I rose in the morning, the whole was present to my mind, although I
had slept soundly in the interval; I felt, however, as if there was some
mitigation of the calamity, though what the danger was with which I was
threatened, I had no notion. When I was dressed, I prepared to take my
medicine, but on lifting the bottle, I fancied that the color was not
the same as usual. I looked again, and hesitated, and finally, instead
of taking two tablespoonfuls, which was my accustomed dose, I took but
one. Fortunate it was that I did so; the apothecary had made a mistake;
the drug was poison; I was seized with a violent vomiting, and other
alarming symptoms, from which I was with difficulty recovered. Had I
taken the two spoonfuls, I should, probably, not have survived to tell
the tale.”
The manner in which I happened to obtain these particulars is not
uninteresting. I was spending the evening with Mr. Wordsworth, at Ridal,
when he mentioned to me that a stranger, who had called on him that
morning, had quoted two lines from his poem of “Laodamia,” which, he
said, to him had a peculiar interest. They were these:—
“The invisible world with thee hath sympathized;
Be thy affections raised and solemnized.”
“I do not know what he alludes to,” said Mr. Wordsworth; “but he gave me
to understand that these lines had a deep meaning for him, and that he
had himself been the subject of such a sympathy.”
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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