Among many of the Gothic nations especially, women were the peculiar professors of divination and magic. The Volva-Seidkona, the Fiolkyngi, the Visindakona, and the Nornir, were the oracular priestesses, the chief of whom was the Hexa. These had the faculty of insight into skulda, or the future, and foreknew the doom of mortals: either to the niflheimr, or hell, over which presided the half blue and half flesh-tinted Hela, the goddess of death, who, as the Cimbric peasants believed, diffused pestilence and plague as she rode over the earth on her three-footed horse Hellhest; or to the Valhalla, or paradise of Odin. And this we read in the “Edda.” EV. Gramercy, Astrophel, you run up the catalogue of these weird women as you were involved in their unholy league. Have a care, or we must have you caged. There was once a Dr. Fordage, a divine of Berkshire, (as it is recorded in a strange book, “Demonium Meridianum, or Satan at Noon-day,”) accused of seeing spectres, such as “dragons with tails eight yards long, with four formidable tusks, and spouting fire from their nostrils.” Remember the peril, and beware. ASTR. Oh, sir, you must impeach by wholesale, for clairvoyance or second sight prevails in some regions as a _national_ faculty. The courses of my travel have shown to me this inspiration, especially among the elevated parts of the globe. The Hartz and other forests in Germany, the Alps and Pyrenees, the Highlands of Scotland, the hills of Ireland, the mountains of the Isle of Man, and the frozen fields of Iceland and Norway, abound in ghostly legends. Among the passes of the Spanish Sierras, also, it is believed that the Saludadores and the Covenanters saw angels on the hill-side during their wanderings and persecutions. EV. And how clear is the _natural_ reason of this. As in the wide desert, so on the mountain, nature assumes her wildest form. Of the awful sublimity of clouds, and vapours, and lightnings, among the gorges of the giant rocks, of the Alps, and the Appenines, and the deep and dreadful howling of a storm in the icy bosom of a glacier, or bellowing among the crumbling walls of ruined castles, the lowlander can form no idea. The mind both of the Bedouin Arab, and especially of the mountaineer, is thus cradled in romance. If that mind be rude and uncultivated, credulity and superstition are its inmates; ignorance being the common stamp of the seers, except in rare instances of deep reflectors or melancholy bookworms, whose abstractions, like those of Allan Bane and Brian and Mac Aulay, assume the prophetic faculty; the seer by its power perceiving, as he declares, things distant or future as if they were before his eye.