Eastern Seas, ch. 8.

40 Edwards, Hist. of the West Indies, book i. ch. 2.

41 Ibid. ch. 3.

42 Falkner, Patagonia, ch. 5.

43 Catlin, North American Indians, vol. ii. p. 6.

to breathe, they set him there, on his favorite steed, and heaped
the earth around him. This does not imply any believed doctrine,
in our sense of the term, but is plainly a spontaneous
transference for the moment, by the poetic imagination, of the
sentiments of the living man to the buried body.

The unhappy Africans who were snatched from their homes, enslaved
and cruelly tasked in the far West India islands, pined under
their fate with deadly homesickness. The intense longing moulded
their plastic belief, just as the sensation from some hot bricks
at the feet of a sleeping man shaped his dreams into a journey up
the side of Atna. They fancied that if they died they should
immediately live again in their fatherland. They committed suicide
in great numbers. At last, when other means had failed to check
this epidemic of self destruction, a cunning overseer brought them
ropes and every facility for hanging, and told them to hang
themselves as fast as they pleased, for their master had bought a
great plantation in Africa, and as soon as they got there they
would be set to work on it. Their helpless credulity took the
impression; and no more suicides occurred.44

The mutual formative influences exerted upon a people's notions
concerning the future state, by the imagination of their poets and
the peculiarities of their clime, are perhaps nowhere more
conspicuously exhibited than in the case of the Caledonians who at
an early period dwelt in North Britain. They had picturesque
traditions locating the habitation of ghosts in the air above
their fog draped mountains. They promised rewards for nothing but
valor, and threatened punishments for nothing but cowardice; and
even of these they speak obscurely. Nothing is said of an under
world. They supposed the ghosts at death floated upward naturally,
true children of the mist, and dwelt forever in the air, where
they spent an inane existence, indulging in sorrowful memories of
the past, and, in unreal imitation of their mortal occupations,
chasing boars of fog amid hills of cloud and valleys of shadow.
The authority for these views is Ossian, "whose genuine strains,"
Dr. Good observes, "assume a higher importance as historical
records than they can claim when considered as fragments of
exquisite