regular periods of the tide. During the flood she lay in a speechless trance, and revived from it on the ebb. Her father was engaged on the Thames, and so struck was he with the regularity of these attacks, that on his return from the river he correctly anticipated the condition of his daughter; and even in the night he has arisen to his work, as her cries on recovering from the fit were always a correct monitor to him of the turning of the tide.

PREMATURE INTERMENT. - RESUSCI

66

TATION.

"Oh sleep! thou ape of death, lie dull upon her; And be her sense but as a monument,

Thus in a chapel lying."-Cymbeline.

Sleep may usurp on nature many hours."-Pericles.

IDA. These stories are, indeed, painfully interesting; but tell us, Evelyn, is it so certain that the shaft of Azrael had irretrievably struck these unhappy creatures of whom you speak? Is it not to be feared that instances of premature sepulture have too often occurred from want of scientific discernment? On the exhumation of the Cimetière des Innocens at Paris, during the Napoleon dynasty, the skeletons were, many of them, discovered in attitudes indicating a struggling to get free; indeed some, we are assured, were partly out of their coffins.

To avert this awful catastrophe, it was the custom, in the provinces of Germany, to place a bellrope in the hand of a corpse for twenty-four hours before burial. We may look on this, perhaps, as one natural source of romance and mystery, for the ringing of bells by the dead has been a favourite omen of the ghostly legends.

Ev. Alas! even my own professional study and

duties have not been free from these melancholy scenes; and if I make not your gentle heart to tremble, fair Castaly, I will recount some of those unhappy instances of fatality to which the errors and neglect of man may doom his fellow-mortal.

Miss C (of C Hall, in Warwickshire) and her brother were the subjects of typhoid fever. She seemed to die, and her bier was placed in the family vault. In a week her brother died also, and when he was taken to the tomb the lady was found sitting in her grave clothes on the steps of the vault, having, after her waking from the trance, died of terror or exhaustion.

A girl, after repeated faintings, was apparently dead, and was taken, as a subject, into the anatomical theatre of the Salpétrière" at Paris. During the night, faint groans were heard in the theatre, but no search was made. In the morning, it was evident that the girl had attempted to disengage herself from the winding-sheet, one leg being thrust from off the tressels, and an arm resting on an adjoining table.

A slave girl of Canton, named Leaning, apparently died. She was placed in a coffin, the lid of which remained unfastened, that her parents might come and see the corpse. Three days after the apparent death, while the remains were being conveyed to the grave, a noise or voice was heard proceeding from the coffin, and on re ering, it was found the woman had again.

In 1838, at Tonnieus, in the Lowe the graveman threw earth on a coffin, groans. Much terrific

assembled. On o

buried man was his arms from the

way

the cov

life

The Emperor Zeno was, as it is written, prematurely buried; and, when the body was soon after casually discovered, it was found that he had, to satisfy acute hunger, eaten some flesh from his arm.

ASTR. One might think that Master Ainsworth, from this record, sketched the episode of the sexton and the old coffin in his "Rookwood." The truth is equal to the fiction.

CAST. When I was at Breslau in 1835 (and this is not one of Astrophel's fictions), a nun of the Ursuline Convent was placed in her coffin in the church. At midnight, the sisters assembled to chant the vigils over the body of their sainted sister. While the holy hymn was echoing through the oratory, the nun arose, tottered to the altar, knelt before the cross, and prayed. The sisters, with a cry of horror, awoke the abbess; and on her arrival, the nun again arose, and lay down in her coffin. The physician of the convent was speedily summoned, but, on his arrival, he found her dead.

There can scarcely be drawn a scene combining the sublime and beautiful of romance in higher intensity than this. It was the spectral visitation of a seraph.

IDA. Like many sublimities of nature, these mysteries have been profaned by unholy imitation, as, for instance, the reanimation of the nuns in the opera of "Robert le Diable." But there is an awful romance mingled with the history of those melancholy creatures, from whose inanimate clay the immortal spirit was thought to have parted, still more impressive. That instinctive, that inexpressible dread with which we contemplate a corpse, is nothing in comparison with that thrill of astonishment which overwhelms us when a body becomes (as in the miraculous recall of Lazarus) reanimated when a spirit appears to visit us from the dead.

Yet this is not fear, for we know it cannot injure us; it is a feeling that we are with something beyond ourselves spiritual, which had seemed to have endured a transfiguration, and been admitted into the order of angelic beings. There must be something of the supernatural which creates this fearful wonder, an impression on the heart that is an especial influence of the Deity: else should we not behold with dread, instead of a sacred pleasure, the success of our efforts in cases of suspended animation?

This visitation from another world is one of the surest indications of our spirituality; and, like the reanimation of soul, and mind, and consciousness, from deep and undreaming sleep, lighting up the body into brilliancy and beauty, might drown a skeptic's reasoning in a flood of holy faith, and overwhelm him with the belief of immortality.

CAST, It is this combination of vitality and death, so seemingly a paradox, that forms the basis of many of our deepest romances; as the "Spectre Life in Death," in the Ancient Mariner of the melancholy Coleridge, himself a wild visionary of the first order. If I remember, he is writing of a spectre ship

"Betwixt us and the sun.
And straight the sun was fleck'd with bars
(Heaven's mother send us grace!)
As if through a dungeon grate he peer'd
With broad and burning face.

Alas! (thought I, and my heart beat loud)
How fast she nears and nears.

Are those her sails that glance in the sun,
Like restless gossameres?

Are those her ribs, through which the sun
Doth peer, as through a grate?

And is that woman all her crew?
Is that a Death-and are there two?
Is Death that woman's mate?

Her lips were red, her looks were free,
Her locks were yellow as gold,

Her skin was white as leprosy,

The nightmare Life in Death was she,
Who thicks man's blood with cold."

Ev. It is melancholy that a noble mind should be so perverted by poppy-juice. And yet the Mohammedan beats him hollow at this sort of burlesque.

There is a fiction in Sale's notes to the "Koran." During the building of his magnificent temple, King Solomon sleeps in death. He remains supported by his staff, on which he had been leaning, until a worm eats away the prop, and the body falls prostrate to the ground.

But we need not go to the East for our specimens. Even in the year 1839, in our Emerald Isle of superstition, they would have us believe a miracle of this kind.

In a field near Lurgan, a man called Farland had received money from a widow wherewith to pay her rent; this he failed to do. On her remonstrance and declaration, she was asked to name her witnesses. She answered, “No one but God and herself." "Then," rejoined the man, "your God was asleep at the time." The attestation of three witnesses records that he was instantly struck in a trance as he was resting on his spade, and in that attitude he had ever since continued!

CAST. And is it not a blot on the page of science that so many ill-fated creatures are thus, through an error, doomed to dissolution? Say, gentle Evelyn, has not your philosophy discovered some mode of discernment between life and death, which would smile the philanthropist on to patient watching!

Ev. To a degree. But it were vain to offer here precepts for such discrimination, which, sooth to say, are not yet absolute. The rosy tint of complexion may remain for some time, and even per