153
tify her, which seemed to distress him, he at last succeeded, and called "Frederic," for the last time. He had never before this moment betrayed the slightest indication, that his organs of speech were at all impaired. Neither did he afterwards in the least labour in his utterance, till within the last hour of his life: but he seemed to find the succession of sounds in the word Frederic rather difficult to articulate, and would not repeat an attempt, in which he had nearly failed.
A very short time before he was seized with his fatal illness, a remarkable circumstance occurred. Minds, prone to superstition, are apt to look back upon the omen after the event. Such a retrospect might have impelled many to construe it into a warning, suggested by the intervention of a preternatural influence on his spirit. Viewed without reference to any such agency, it still deserves notice; but only so far as it tends to prove, how early and how deeply the belief of immortality had taken root
