form of a positive fact, by various coincidences
which are accepted as corroborative testimony,
yet which are, nevertheless, nothing more than
coincidences found in every-day matters of business,
but only emphatically noticed when we
can exclaim, ' How astonishing!' In your case
such coincidences have been, indeed, very signal,
and might well aggravate the perplexities into
which your reason was thrown. Sir Philip
Derval's murder, the missing casket, the exciting
nature of the manuscript, in which a superstitious
interest is already enlisted by your expectation
to find in it the key to the narrator's
boasted powers, and his reasons for the astounding
denunciation of the man whom you suspect
to be his murderer; in all this there is much to
confirm, nay, to cause, an illusion, and for that
very reason, when examined by strict laws of
evidence, in all this there is but additional proof
that the illusion was—only illusion. Your affections
contribute to strengthen your fancy in its
war on your reason. The girl you so passionately
love develops, to your disquietude and
terror, the visionary temperament which, at her
age, is ever liable to fantastic caprices. She hears
Margrave's song, which, you say, has a wildness
of charm that affects and thrills even you.
Who does not know the power of music? and of
all music, there is none so potential as that of the
human voice. Thus, in some languages, charm and
song are identical expressions; and even when
a critic in our own sober newspapers extols a
Malibran or a Grisi, you may be sure that he
will call her 'enchantress.' Well, this lady,
your betrothed, in whom the nervous system is
extremely impressionable, hears a voice which,
even to your ear, is strangely melodious, and
sees a form and face which, even to your eye,
are endowed with a singular character of beauty.
Her fancy is impressed by what she thus hears
and sees, and impressed the more because, by a
coincidence not very uncommon, a face like that
which she beholds, has before been presented to
her in a dream or a reverie. In the nobleness
of genuine, confiding, reverential love, rather
than impute to your beloved a levity of sentiment
that would seem to you a treason, you accept
the chimera of ' magical fascination.' In
this frame of mind you sit down to read the
memoir of a mystical enthusiast. Do you begin
now to account for the Luminous Shadow? A
dream! And a dream no less because your
eyes were open and you believed yourself awake.
The diseased imagination resembles those mirrors
which, being themselves distorted, represent
distorted pictures as correct.

"And even this Memoir of Sir Philip Derval's;
—can you be quite sure that you actually read the
part which relates to Haroun and Louis Grayle?
You say that, while perusing the manuscript,
you saw the Luminous Shadow and became insensible.
The old woman says you were fast
asleep. May you not really have fallen into a
slumber, and in that slumber have dreamed the
parts of the tale that relate to Grayle? dreamed
that you beheld the Shadow? Do you remember
what is said so well by Dr. Abercrombie, to
authorise the explanation I suggest to you: ' A
person under the influence of some strong mental
impression falls asleep for a few seconds,
perhaps without being sensible of it: some scene
or person appears in a dream, and he starts up
under the conviction that it was a spectral
appearance.' "*

* Abercrombie on the Intellectual Powers, p. 278.
(15th edition.) This author, not more to be admired
for his intelligence than his candour, and who
is entitled to praise for a higher degree of original
thought than that to which he modestly pretends,
relates a curious anecdote illustrating ' the analogy
between dreaming and spectral illusion, which he
received from the gentleman to whom it occurred—
an eminent medical friend:' '' Having set up late one
evening, under considerable anxiety for one of his
children, who was ill, he fell asleep in his chair, and
had a frightful dream, in which the prominent figure
was an immense baboon. He awoke with the fright,
got up instantly, and walked to a table which was
in the middle of the room. He was then quite
awake, and quite conscious of the articles around
him; but close by the wall in the end of the apartment
he distinctly saw the baboon making the same
grimaces which he had seen in his dream; and this
spectre continued visible for about half a minute."
Now, a man who saw only a baboon would be quite
ready to admit that it was but an optical illusion;
but if, instead of a baboon, he had seen an intimate
friend, and that friend, by some coincidence of time,
had died about that date, he would be a very strong-minded
man if he admitted, for the mystery of seeing
his friend, the same natural solution which he would
readily admit for seeing a baboon.

"But," said I, "the apparition was seen by
me again, and when I, certainly, was not sleeping."'

"True; and who should know better than a
physician so well read as yourself that a spectral
illusion once beheld is always apt to return again
in the same form. Thus, Goethe was long haunted
by one image; the phantom of a flower unfolding
itself, and developing new flowers.† Thus,
one of our own most distinguished philosophers
tells us of a lady known to himself, who would
see her husband, hear him move and speak, when
he was not even in the house.‡ But instances
of the facility with which phantasms, once admitted,
repeat themselves to the senses are numberless.
Many are recorded by Hibbert and
Abercrombie, and every physician in extensive
practice can add largely, from his own experience,
to the list. Intense self-concentration is,
in itself, a mighty magician. The magicians of
the East inculcate the necessity of fast, solitude,
and meditation for the due development of their
imaginary powers. And I have no doubt with
effect; because fast, solitude, and meditation—
in other words, thought or fancy intensely concentred,
will both raise apparitions and produce
the invoker's belief in them. Spinello, striving
to conceive the image of Lucifer for his picture
of the Fallen Angels, was at last actually haunted

† See Müller's observations on this phenomenon,
Physiology of the Senses, Baley's translation, p.
1395.

‡ Sir David Brewster's Letters on Natural Magic,
p. 39.