faculty which enables thought to create, is of all
others the most exhausting to life when unduly
stimulated, and consciously reasoning on its
own creations. I think it probable that, had
this sorrow not befallen you, you would have
known a sorrow yet graver—you would have
long survived your Lilian. As it is now, when
she recovers, her whole organisation, physical
and mental, will have uindergone a beneficent
change. But, I repeat my prediction; some
severe malady of the body will precede the
restoration of the mind; and it is my hope that
the present suspense or aberration of the more
wearing powers of the mind fit the body to endure
and surmount the physical crisis. I remember a
case, within my own professional experience, in
many respects similar to this, but in other
respects it was less hopeful. I was consulted by a
young student of the frailest physical conformation,
of great mental energies, and consumed by
an intense ambition. He was reading for university
honours. He would not listen to me when I
entreated him to rest his mind. I thought that
he was certain to obtain the distinction for
which he toiled, and equally certain to die a few
months after obtaining it. He falsified both
my deductions. He so overworked himself that,
on the day of examination, his nerves were
agitated, his memory failed him; he passed, not
without a certain credit, but fell far short of the
rank amongst his fellow-competitors to which
he aspired. Here, then, the irritated mind acted
on the disappointed heart, and raised a new train
of emotions. He was first visited by spectral
illusions; then he sank into a state in which the
external world seemed quite blotted out. He
heeded nothing that was said to him; seemed
to see nothing that was placed before his eyes;
in a word, sensations became dormant, ideas
preconceived usurped their place, and those
ideas gave him pleasure. He believed that his
genius was recognised, and lived amongst its
supposed creations, enjoying an imaginary fame.
So it went on for two years. During that
period his frail form became robust and
vigorous. At the end of that time he was
seized with a fever, which would have swept
him in three days to the grave had it occurred
when I was first called in to attend him. He
conquered the fever, and, in recovering, acquired the
full possession of the intellectual faculties so long
suspended. When I last saw him, many years
afterwards, he was in perfect health, and the
object of his young ambition was realised; the
body had supported the mind—he had achieved
distinction. Now what had so, for a time, laid
this strong intellect into visionary sleep? the
most agonising of human emotions in a noble
spirit—shame! What has so stricken down
your Lilian? You have told me the story;
shame!—the shame of a nature pre-eminently
pure. But observe, that in his case as in hers,
the shock inflicted does not produce a succession
of painful illusions; on the contrary,
in both, the illusions are generally pleasing.
Had the illusions been painful, the body
would have suffered—the patient died.

Why did a painful shock produce pleasing illusions?
because, no matter how a shock on the nerves
may originate, if it affects the reason, it does
but make more vivid than impressions from
actual external objects, the ideas previously
most cherished. Such ideas in the young
student were ideas of earthly fame; such ideas
in the young maiden are ideas of angel
comforters and heavenly Edens. You miss her mind
on the earth, and, while we speak, it is in
paradise."

"Much that you say, my friend, is authorised
by the speculations of great writers, with
whom I am not unfamiliar; but in none of those
writers, nor in your encouraging words do I
find a solution for much that has no precedents
in my experience—much, indeed, that has
analogies in my reading, but analogies which I have
ever before despised as old wives' fables. I
have bared to your searching eye the weird
mysteries of my life. How do you account for
facts which you cannot resolve into illusions?
for the influence which that strange being,
Margrave, exercised over Lilian's mind or
fancy, so that for a time her love for me was
as dormant as is her reason now: so that he
could draw her—her whose nature you admit
to be singularly pure and modest—from her
mother's home?' The magic wand! the trance
into which that wand threw Margrave himself;
the apparition which it conjured up in my own
quiet chamber, when my mind was without a
care and my health without a flaw. How
account for all this—as you endeavoured, and
perhaps successfully, to account for all my
impressions of the Vision in the Museum, of the
luminous haunting Shadow in its earlier
apparitions, when my fancy was heated, my heart
tormented, and, it might be, even the physical
forces of this strong frame disordered?"

"Allen," said the old pathologist, " here we
approach a ground which few physicians have
dared to examine. Honour to those who, like
our bold contemporary, Elliotson, have braved
scoff and sacrificed dross in seeking to extract
what is practical in uses, what can be tested by
experiment, from those exceptional phenomena
on which magic sought to found a philosophy,
and to which philosophy tracks the origin of
magic."

"What! Do I understand you? Is it you,
Julius Faber, who attach faith to the wonders
ascribed to animal magnetism and electro-biology,
or subscribe to the doctrines which their
practitioners teach?"

"I have not examined into those doctrines,
nor seen with my own eyes the wonders recorded,
upon evidence too respectable, nevertheless, to
permit me peremptorily to deny what I have not
witnessed.* But wherever I look through the

* What Faber here says is expressed with more
authority by one of the most accomplished metaphysicians
of our time (Sir W. Hamilton):

"Somnambulism is a phenomenon still more
astonishing (than dreaming). In this singular state a
person performs a regular series of rational actions,
and those frequently of the most difficult and delicate
nature; and what is still more marvellous, with
a talent to which he could make no pretension when
awake. (Cr. Ancillon, Essais Philos. ii. 161.) His
memory and reminiscence supply him with recollections
of words and things which, perhaps, never
were at his disposal in the ordinary state— he speaks
more fluently a more refined language. And if we
are to credit what the evidence on which it rests
hardly allows us to disbelieve, he has not only
perception of things through other channels than the
common organs of sense, but the sphere of his
cognition is amplified to an extent far beyond the limits
to which sensible perception is confined. This
subject is one of the most perplexing in the whole
compass of philosophy; for, on the one hand, the
phenomena are so remarkable that they cannot be
believed, and yet, on the other, they are of so
unambiguous and palpable a character, and the
witnesses to their reality are so numerous, so intelligent,
and so high above every suspicion of deceit, that it
is equally impossible to deny credit to what is
attested by such ample and unexceptional
evidence."—Sir W. Hamilton's Lectures on
Metaphysics and Logic, vol. ii. p. 274.

This perplexity, in which the distinguished
philosopher leaves the judgment so equally balanced
that it finds it impossible to believe, and yet
impossible to disbelieve, forms the right state of mind in
which a candid thinker should come to the examination
of those more extraordinary phenomena
which he has not himself yet witnessed, but the
fair inquiry into which may be tendered to him
by persons above the imputation of quackery and
fraud. Miiller, who is not the least determined, as
he is certainly one of the most distinguished
disbelievers of mesmeric phenomena, does not appear to
have witnessed, or at least to have carefully
examined, them, or he would, perhaps, have seen that
even the more extraordinary of those phenomena
confirm, rather than contradict, his own general
theories, and may be explained by the sympathies
one sense has with another—" the laws of reflexion
through the medium of the brain." (Physiology of
Senses, p. 1311.) And again by the maxim " that
the mental principle, or cause of the mental phenomena,
cannot be confined to the brain, but that it
exists in a latent state in every part of the
organism." (Ib. p. 1355.) The " nerve power,"
contended for by Mr. Bain, also, may suggest a rational
solution of much that has seemed incredible to those
physiologists who have not condescended to sift the
genuine phenomena of mesmerism from the imposture
to which, in all ages, the phenomena exhibited
by what may be called the ecstatic temperament,
have been applied.