ated the brilliant divisions and rapid
passages of the music which had impressed her imagination during
health! We might multiply instances of the singular effects of
peculiar conditions of the brain upon the imaginative faculty. For one
case we can give our personal testimony. A young man, naturally
imaginative, but by no means of weak mind, or credulous, or
superstitious, saw, even in broad daylight, spectres or apparitions of
persons far distant. After being accustomed to these visits, he
regarded them without any fear, except on account of the derangement
of health which they indicated. These visions were banished by a
course of medical treatment. In men of great imaginative power, with
whom reason is by no means deficient, phenomena sometimes occur almost
as vivid as those of disease in other persons. Wordsworth, speaking of
the impressions derived from certain external objects, says:

------------ on the mind
They lay like images, _and seemed almost
To haunt the bodily sense_!

Again, in his verses recording his impression of the beauty of a bed
of daffodils, he says:

And oft, _when on my couch I lie_, [dozing?]
They _flash_ before that inward eye
Which is the bliss of solitude.

These words are nothing more, we believe, than a simple and
unexaggerated statement of a mental phenomenon.

Enough has now been said to shew, that in a certain condition of the
brain, when it is deprived of the wakefulness and activity necessary
for the free use of reason, the effects of imagination may far exceed
any that are displayed during a normal, waking state of the
intellectual faculties. The question now remains: Are the means
employed by the professors of electro-biology sufficient to produce
that peculiar condition to which we refer? We believe that they are;
and shall proceed to give reasons for such belief.

3. What are these means? or rather let us ask, 'Amid the various means
employed, which is the real agent?' We observe that, in the different
processes by which--under the names of electro-biology or mesmerism--a
peculiar cerebral condition is induced, such means as the following
are employed:--Fixed attention on one object--it may be a metallic
disk said to have galvanic power, or a sixpence, or a cork; silence,
and a motionless state of the body are favourable to the intended
result; monotonous movements by the experimenter, called 'passes,' may
be used or not. The process may be int