"He seemed to tread the
earth as a spirit from some better world." The author of "Horae
Subsecivae" aptly quotes Shakspeare's memorable words, in connection
with the tragic bereavement of that autumnal day in Vienna:--

"The idea of thy life shall sweetly creep
Into my study of imagination;
And every lovely organ of thy life
Shall come apparelled in more precious habit,
More moving delicate, and full of life,
Into the eye and prospect of my soul,
Than when thou liv'dst indeed."

Standing by the grave of this young person, now made so renowned by the
genius of a great poet, whose song has embalmed his name and called the
world's attention to his death, the inevitable reflection is not of
sorrow. He sleeps well who is thus lamented, and "nothing can touch
him further."

THE CONFESSIONS OF A MEDIUM.

It is not yet a year since I ceased to act as a Spiritual Medium. (I am
forced to make use of this title as the most intelligible, but I do it
with a strong mental protest.) At first, I desired only to withdraw
myself quietly from the peculiar associations into which I had been
thrown by the exercise of my faculty, and be content with the simple
fact of my escape. A man who joins the Dashaways does not care to have
the circumstance announced in the newspapers. "So, he was an habitual
drunkard," the public would say. I was overcome by a similar
reluctance,--nay, I might honestly call it shame,--since, although I had
at intervals officiated as a Medium for a period of seven years, my name
had been mentioned, incidentally, only once or twice in the papers
devoted especially to Spiritualism. I had no such reputation as that of
Hume or Andrew Jackson Davis, which would call for a public statement of
my recantation. The result would be, therefore, to give prominence to a
weakness, which, however manfully overcome, might be remembered to my
future prejudice.

I find, however, that the resolution to be silent leaves me restless and
unsatisfied. And in reflecting calmly--objectively, for the first
time--upon the experience of those seven years, I recognize so many
points wherein my case is undoubtedly analogous to that of hundreds of
others who may be still entangled in the same labyrinth whence I have
but recently escaped, so clear a solution of much that is enigmatical,
even to those who reject Spiritualism, that the impulse to write weighs
upon me with the pressure of a neglected du