lead-like and lifeless eye; the calm,
awful, mysterious repose which broods over the aspect of the dead;--all
grew, as it were, from the hazy cloud that encircled them for one, one
brief, agonising moment, and then as suddenly faded away. The spell
passed from his senses. He sprang from the bed with a loud cry. All was
quiet. There was not a trace of what he had witnessed. The feeble light
of the skies rested upon the spot where the apparition had stood; upon
that spot he stood also. He stamped upon the floor--it was firm beneath
his footing. He passed his hands over his body--he was awake--he was
unchanged: earth, air, heaven, were around him as before. What had thus
gone over his soul to awe and overcome it to such weakness? To these
questions his reason could return no answer. Bold by nature, and
sceptical by philosophy, his mind gradually recovered its original tone:
he did not give way to conjecture; he endeavoured to discard it; he
sought by natural causes to account for the apparition he had seen or
imagined; and, as he felt the blood again circulating in its accustomed
courses, and the night air coming chill over his feverish frame, he
smiled with a stern and scornful bitterness at the terror which had so
shaken, and the fancy which had so deluded, his mind.

Are there not "more things in heaven and earth than are dreamed of in
our philosophy"? A Spirit may hover in the air that we breathe: the
depth of our most secret solitudes may be peopled by the invisible;
our uprisings and our downsittings may be marked by a witness from the
grave. In our walks the dead may be behind us; in our banquets they may
sit at the board; and the chill breath of the night wind that stirs the
curtains of our bed may bear a message our senses receive not, from
lips that once have pressed kisses on our own! Why is it that at moments
there creeps over us an awe, a terror, overpowering, but undefined?
Why is it that we shudder without a cause, and feel the warm life-blood
stand still in its courses? Are the dead too near? Do unearthly wings
touch us as they flit around? Has our soul any intercourse which
the body shares not, though it feels, with the supernatural
world--mysterious revealings--unimaginable communion--a language of
dread and power, shaking to its centre the fleshly barrier that divides
the spirit from its race?

How fearful is the very life which we hold! We have our being beneath a
cloud, and are a marvel even to oursel