“Yet, rash astrologer, refrain; Too dearly would be won The prescience of another’s pain, If purchased by thine own.” And I will tell him what Collins writes on the perils of the seer, in his “Ode on Highland Superstition,”— “How they whose sight such dreary dreams engross, With their own vision oft astonished droop, When o’er the wat’ry strath or quaggy moss They see the gliding ghosts embodied troop.— They know what spirit brews the stormful day, And, heartless, oft like moody madness stare To see the phantom train their secret work prepare.” He listens not to me. Nay, then, I will try the virtue of a _spell_ that has oft shed a ray of light over the dark hour of the ghost-seer. I will whisper music in thine ear, Astrophel. The fiend of Saul was chased away by the harp of David; the gloomy shadows of Allan Mac Aulay were brightened by the melody of Annot Lyle; and the illusion of Philip of Spain, that he was dead and in his grave, was dispelled by the exquisite lute of the Rose of the Alhambra. ASTR. My thanks, fair Castaly; yet wherefore should I claim your syren spells. _My_ visions are delightful as the inspiration of the improvisatore, and carry not the penalty of the monomaniac. But say, if there _be_ (in vulgar words) a crack in this cranium of mine, may not this crack, as saith the learned Samuel Parr, “_let in the light_?” If prophetic visions in the _early ages_ came over the dying, why not in ours? The last solemn speech of Jacob was an inspired prophecy of the miraculous advent:—“The sceptre shall not depart from Judah, nor a lawgiver from between his feet, until Shiloh come, and to him shall the gathering of the people be.” And is it profanation to ask, why may not the departing spirit of holiness, even now, prophecy to _us_? As we see the stars from the deep well, so may such spirits look into futurity from the dark abyss of dissolution. In some cases of little children, I have learned that this unearthly feeling has caused them to anticipate their dying. How pathetically does John Evelyn, in his Diary, allude to the anticipation of his little boy,—“an angel in body and in mind, who died of a quartan ague, in his fifth year. The day before he died, he called to me and told me that, for all I loved him so dearly, I should give my house, lands, and all my fine things, to his brother.” The dying seem indeed themselves to feel that they are scarcely of this world. Holcroft, a short time before his death, hearing his children on the stairs, said to his wife, “Are those _your_ children, Louisa?”—as if he were already in another existence. As if the human mind itself were perusing the celestial volume of the recording angel,—the awful book of fate.