Wrapt in luscious life from head to heel,
   Swimming from trance to trance of speechless pleasure,
And now and then, not erring, dream of blias
Whose brimful soul runs over in a kiss!

MODERN MAGIC.

NOT the magic of Herr Wiljalba Frikell or
the Wizard of the North; nothing to do with
Invisible Ladies or Robert-Houdin's mighty
mysteries; but magic of the true black and
white sort – witchcraft, demonology, possession,
and the like, revived in the modest phrase of
Spiritualism. This is the great drawing-room
excitement of the day; the phase of spiritual
development, which has already turned more
than one unstable head, and which threatens to
turn a few more before it dies quietly out in its
present form, and leaves only the due residuum
of scientific truth.

Spiritualism is nothing new: it is as old as
the Egyptian caves and temples and initiatory
trials; as old as the time when a certain Hebrew
contended with Jannes and Jambres before
Pharaoh that he should let the children of Israel
go; as old as Saul and the Witch of Endor (the
Jews, indeed, were always fond of dabbling in
the art, and in Leviticus are expressly forbidden
that, indulgence); as old as the Delphic Oracles,
and the Eleusinian Mysteries; as old as the exact
sciences, as old as nervous diseases, as superstition
and ignorance, and the habit of jumping to
conclusions before the foundations are laid, which we
find everywhere, in proportion to the want of
scientific knowledge existing in a community.
What is called spiritualism is not all false in its
results, however false in its theory; but what
there is of true in it has been so overlaid with
trick and deception that it is a hard task to
distinguish one from the other, or to draw up a
distinct account to which one would sign one's
name. No one denies that there is an abnormal
condition of the brain and nervous system
which enables people to say and do things
quite foreign to their natural power. We see
it constantly in persons afflicted with hysteria,
epilepsy, catalepsy, and other congenital diseases;
and it does not seem impossible that the
state may be artificially induced, and that the
brain may be acted on other than through the
senses. So far, then, certain of the phenomena
of spiritualism may be true; but no farther, as
evidencing some of the subtle harmonies between
man and universal nature, not yet catalogued
and labelled.

It is almost as presumptuous to say what is
absolutely impossible (relatively, we have few
stumbling places) as it is rash to believe without
examination. I should not like to say that this
Brompton house in which I write could not be
moved by a Superior Power, and transported
bodily to Bethnal-green; but I should be very
positive in asserting that it would not be so
dealt with. And certainly if a medium, charged
with my conversion, took me in the night
from my library, and carried me in a cab to
another library, furnished in exactly the same
manner, then bade me believe that he and his
spirits had transported my house, and that this
was my own library, and none other, I think I
should believe, instead, that he had brought me
about and about back to my own natural house,
or that he had furnished another room according
to the pattern of mine – I think I should believe
in any trick possible to human ingenuity rather
than in the assertion of even the most respectable
medium that my house at Brompton had
been borne by spirits through the air and placed
in Bethnal-green. I know that the usual spirit
manifestations are less impossible than this; that
table tapping and tipping; spirit hands made
visible to the eye and palpable to the touch;
spirit communications (for the most part sad
rubbish) lying on tombstones, or pinned to
curtains; that mediums writing on drawing-room
ceilings in the dark; that spirits, tying knots
under the table, and turning down the leaves of
the Bible, also under the table; that guitars
played by invisible hands, and accordions held
straight out, as never accordions were held
before; I know that all these things are less
absolutely impossible, because more susceptible
of trick, than taking a brick house off its
foundations, and carrying it, like Solomon's carpet,
between the clouds and the water. But I have
seen nothing yet which cannot be referred to the
abnormal, not supernatural, power of high
nervous excitement, and to clever conjuring. Of
the last I have seen infinitely more than of the
first, it being easier to learn a trick than to
elaborate brain power.

We must remember, too, as I said before, that
nothing of all this is new; the same facts and
circumstances having been produced in an
endless round for ages and ages past, without ever
getting any nearer to usefulness or universality.
Take the first and cleverest spiritualists of the
middle ages, Dr. John Dee and his assistant,
Edward Kelly; why, not Mr. Home, the present
high-priest of the mysteries, himself surpasses
them in what they said they saw and heard, or
in the engaging familiarity of their spirits!
They had a practical object, too, in their mediumship,
of which we can see the use and direction;
but spiritual communications in general have no
more rationality, sequence, or practical good
in them, than the muttered utterance of a
dreamer. Edward Kelly and Dr. John Dee
were wiser in their generation, and took care
to assume a distinct and positive purpose
in their mediumship. Kelly was very
"developed." He used to look into the crystal, which
the doctor said had been brought to him by
spirits, and see more than even any of the Baron
Dupotet's extatiques have ventured to declare.
As for spirits in the body – spirits visible,
audible, palpable – they came as thick as morning
callers; and not a bit more terrifying. But the
odd thing about them was, they were all spirits
of the period; spirits speaking the language then
in use, knowing no more than the world knew
then, and not advancing a hair's breadth beyond
what was considered orthodox and final by