that the soul became divine in the same
ratio as its connection with the body was loosened or destroyed. In
sleep, the unity is weakened but not ended: hence, in sleep, the
material being dead, the immaterial, or divine principle, wanders
unguided, like a gentle breeze over the unconscious strings of an AEolian
harp; and according to the health or disease of the body are pleasing
visions or horrid phantoms (_aegri somnia_, as Horace) present to the
mind of the sleeper. Before death, the soul, or immaterial principle,
is, as it were, on the confines of two worlds, and may possess at the
same moment a power which is both prospective and retrospective. At that
time its connection with the body being merely nominal, it partakes of
that perfectly pure, ethereal, and exalted nature (_quod multo magis
faciet post mortem quum omnino corpore excesserit_) which is designed
for it hereafter.

As the question is an interesting one, I conclude by asking, through the
medium of the "NOTES AND QUERIES," if a belief in this power of prophesy
before death be known to exist at the present day?

AUGUSTUS GUEST.

London, July 8.

[Footnote 1: For the assistance of the general reader, I have introduced
hasty translations of the several passages quoted.]

[Footnote 2: (And I moreover tell you, and do you meditate well upon it,
that) you yourself are not destined to live long, for even now death is
drawing nigh unto you, and a violent fate awaits you,--about to be slain
in fight by the hands of Achilles, the irreproachable son of Oacus.]

[Footnote 3: Consider now whether I may not be to you the cause of
divine anger, in that day when Paris and Phoebus Apollo shall slay you,
albeit so mighty, at the Scaean gate.]

[Footnote 4: Wherefore I have an earnest desire to prophesy to you who
have condemned me; for I am already arrived at that stage of my
existence in which, especially, men utter prophetic sayings, that is,
when they are about to die.]

[Footnote 5: That time, indeed, the soul of man appears to be in a
manner divine, for to a certain extent it foresees things which are
about to happen.]

[Footnote 6: Pythagoras the Samian, and some others of the ancient
philosophers, showed that the souls of men were immortal, and that, when
they were on the point of separating from the body, they possessed a
knowledge of futurity.]

[Footnote 7: The soul, says Aristotle, when on the point of taking its
departure from the body, foretells a