s contributions; and should embody
valuable moral principle; and, to secure these excellencies, the possessor
of an elegant album should not place it in the hand of any, accompanied
with the request that a contribution be inserted, without ascertaining, in
the first instance, that the person solicited is of genuine taste and
talent, and real principle; because, if these qualifications be not
developed, an album will be merely filled with trifling, crude,
unconnected, and worthless pieces--marked by no beauty, exhibiting no
taste, characterized by no originality, and inculcating no valuable
sentiment.

T. W.

* * * * *

POPULAR SUPERSTITIONS.

(_For the Mirror._)

No man will be found in whose mind airy notions do not sometimes
tyrannize and force him to hope or fear beyond the limits of sober
probability.--JOHNSON.

The superstitions of nations must always be interesting, since they afford
a criterion of the progress that knowledge and reason have made. To trace
the origin of the belief that departed spirits revisit the earth, a belief
apparently so repugnant to reason and revelation, must ever attract the
attention of the curious. For it is a question of importance to religion,
even although the existence of apparitions would not in the slightest
degree invalidate those sacred writings on which the bases of religion are
founded; on the contrary, if the reality of apparitions (that is of the
existence of apparitions) could be ascertained, another proof would be
added to an immense weight of testimony of the ability possessed by the
Deity to arrest or alter what appears the ordinary course of nature.

The existence of apparitions has been acknowledged by many, and a tendency
towards a belief of them is to be remarked in many more. Ardent, and what
is stranger still, since directly opposed to ardent, morbid minds are too
ready to embrace "the pleasing dreadful thought," and to this may be
attributed the prevalence of this kind of superstition among the poets, and
all indeed of an enthusiastic temperament.[3] Some of the tales urged in
defence of apparitions are upon a _prima facie_ observation to be traced to
an exuberance[4] of imagination on the part of the ghost, others that are
plainly false, and others that as they cannot be authenticated, are not
worthy of notice. I shall here give what I consider an example of the
former.

[3] Dr. Johnson, it is well know