But in the purely _metaphysical ghost_ or phantom, the change of position or locality will not essentially dispel the illusion, (the spectrum following, as it were, the motion of the eye;) because it exists in the mind itself, either as a faint or transient idea, or a mere outline, fading perhaps in a brighter light, or as the more permanent and confirmed impression of insanity, (unchanged even by “brilliant glare,”) or from the day-dream of the castle-builder, to the deep and dreadful delusion of the maniac. Among the mute productions of nature, there are eccentricities and rarities, which, in default of analysis or explanation, would not fail of being referred to some supernatural agency: as Leo Afer, according to Burton, accounts for the swarms of locusts once descending at Fez, in Barbary, and at Arles, in France, in 1553. “It could not be from natural causes; they cannot imagine whence they come, but from heaven. Are these and such creatures, corn, wood, stones, worms, wool, blood, &c. lifted up into the middle region by the sunbeams, as Baracellus the physician disputes, and thence let fall with showers, or there engendered? Cornelius Gemma is of that opinion, they are there conceived by celestial influences: others suppose they are immediately from God, or prodigies raised by arts and illusions of spirits which are princes of the ayre.” Over Languedoc there once burst an awful and supernatural cloud, from which fell immense snow-flakes like glittering stars. There is nothing strange in this, for the shape of the snow-flake is ever that of an _asteroïd_. But then there came pouring down gigantic hail-stones, with their glassy surface impressed with the figures of helmets, and swords, and scutcheons. This too may be the effect of very sudden and irregular congelation; but this law was not known, and therefore its result was a mystery. Among the wonders seen by the great traveller, Pietro della Valla, was the _bleeding_ cypress-tree, which shadows the tomb of Cyrus, in Italy. Under the hollow of its boughs, in his day, it was lighted with lamps and was consecrated as an oratory. To this shrine resorted many a devout pilgrim, impressed with a holy belief in the _miracle_. And what was this but the glutinous crimson fluid, exuding from the diseased alburnum of a tree, which the woodmen indeed term _bleeding_, but which the ancient Turks affirmed, or believed, to be converted on every Friday into drops of real blood? The red snow, which is not uncommon in the arctic regions, is thus tinted by very minute cryptogamic plants; and the fairy ring is but a circle of herbage poisoned by a fungus. In Denbighshire (I may add) the prevalent belief is, that the _shivering_ of the aspen is from _sympathy_ with that tree in Palestine, which was hewn into the true cross.