o innate feeling to
which they might, and without effort, unite. The progress, however, of
the omen and vision, clearer and clearer, pointing to the very deed,
and even while its enactment has commenced, and that fatality by which
(prophetic, too) the plainest prophecy is unheeded, contemned, and the
Prophetess herself doomed, and knowing herself doomed, may be
considered as an epitome of the Grecian creeds upon the subject. It
was no vulgar punning spirit that designated the very _name_ of Helen
as a cursing omen.

[Greek:
"Tis pot' honomazen hod
Es to pan etetumos--
Me tis onton ouch oro--
Men pronoaisi tou pepromeuou
Glossan en tucha nemon."]

Helen, the destroyer--yes, that was her significant name. The present
King of the French was not allowed to assume the title of Valois,
which was, strictly speaking, his, and instead assumed that of Duc de
Chartres, on account of an evil omen attached to the former name; and
that evil omen originating in a curious fact, the seeing of a spectre
by that German princess who succeeded the poisoned sister of our
second Charles. But there is nothing in modern history more analogous
to the fatalities of the Grecian drama than those singular passages
relating to the death of Henry the Fourth of France. We have the
gravest authority of the gravest historians, that prophecies,
warnings, and omens so prepared Henry for his death, that he waited
for it with a calm resignation, as to an irresistible fatality. "In
fact," (says an eloquent writer in Maga of April 1840,) "it is to this
attitude of listening expectation in the king, and breathless waiting
for the blow, that Schiller alludes in that fine speech of Wallenstein
to his sister, where he notices the funeral knells that sounded
continually in Henry's ears; and, above all, his prophetic instinct,
that caught the sound from a far distance of his murderer's motions,
that could distinguish, amidst all the tumult of a mighty Capital,
those stealthy steps."

And does it seem so strange to you, Eusebius, if the ear and the eye,
those outposts, as it were, of the ever watchful, spiritual, and
intellectual sentinels within man, convey the secret intelligences
that most concern him? What is there, Eusebius, so marvellous to your
conception, if there be sympathy more than electric between those two
worlds, outer Nature and Man himself? If earth, that with him and for
him partook of one curse, with all its accompanyin