sang her graceful figure and beautiful flaxen locks; and how often they failed, when they attempted to describe the particular and undefinable character which distinguished her fine blue eyes! I must say, I have often embraced my sister, whom I loved with the greatest affection, merely to have the pleasure of getting nearer, if possible, to her soft angelic eyes, from which Seraphina’s pale countenance borrowed all its sublimity.
“She received many extremely advantageous proposals of marriage, but declined them all. You know her predilection in favour of solitude, and that she never went out but to enjoy my society. She took no pleasure in dress; nay, she even avoided all occasion which required more than ordinary expense. Those who were not acquainted with the singularity of her character, might have accused her of affectation.
“But a very extraordinary particularity, which I by chance discovered in her just as she attained her fifteenth year, created an impression of fear on my mind which will never be effaced.
“On my return from making a visit, I found Seraphina in my father’s cabinet, near the window, with her eyes fixed and immoveable. Accustomed from her earliest infancy to see her in this situation, without being perceived by her, I pressed her to my bosom, without producing on her the least sensation of my presence. At this moment I looked towards the garden, and I there saw my father walking with this same Seraphina whom I held in my arms!
“‘In the name of God, my sister!’ exclaimed I, equally cold with the statue before me, who now began to recover.
“At the same time my eye involuntarily returned towards the garden where I had seen her, and there perceived my father alone, looking with uneasiness, as it appeared to me, for her who, but an instant before, was with him. I endeavoured to conceal this event from my sister; but in the most affectionate tone she loaded me with questions to learn the cause of my agitation.” p. 69—73.This quotation is rather of the longest: but it will serve as a specimen of the art with which these written stories are contrived to excite the interest of familiarity, by dwelling on circumstantial details, apparently of no importance, but which are in reality inseparable from the impressions which they are designed to awaken.
We must not quit this chapter without reminding our sceptical readers, that the spectral apparition of persons yet living is a fact sanctioned by authority of no less eminence in the church than that of St Augustin, who relates of himself, that he appeared at two several times, without being conscious of it, to persons with whom he was not acquainted, but who afterwards satisfied him of the truth by the most unequivocal evidence. In like manner St Benedict shewed himself to certain master builders for the purpose of giving them instructions in the edification of a monastery; and St Meletius, while in residence at his episcopal palace of Antioch, invested Theodosius the Great with the imperial purple at Constantinople.
The “Death’s Head,” though sufficiently horrific (we believe that is the established phrase), is not quite equal in interest to the other pieces in the collection. The idea of a phantom appearing to claim the property of its own bones, and rescue them from violation by the living, is not original, though capable of being worked upon to good effect. The antiquary who carried off a tooth in triumph from one of the Wiltshire Barrows, only dreamed that he saw a Roman soldier by his bed-side, who horribly whistled through the gap which its absence produced in the front of his mouth, “Redde mihi quod abstulisti!”
The “Death-bride” is somewhat obscure; and besides, it is hardly sufficiently varied from the subject of the Fated Hour. It brings, however, various legends of “the olden time” to our recollection, and particularly, as the origin perhaps of all later fictions of the same class, the singular narrative of Phlegon, the freedman of the Emperor Hadrian, respecting the loves of Machates and Philinnion. The reverend father Dom. Augustin Calmet pretends indeed to reconcile this extraordinary story to the common course of nature, by supposing, that the “Death-bride” had by accident been buried alive, and that her resurrection from the tomb was only that of a living person recovered from a trance resembling death; and he cites a parallel circumstance from the “causes celebres” of a young woman, a merchant’s daughter of the Rue St Honoré in Paris, who, having been married against her inclination, fell sick shortly after, and falling into a swoon, was put in her coffin for dead, and so buried, who nevertheless recovered, and, escaping from the tomb by the assistance of her lover, who came to mourn over her, afterwards married her deliverer, and by so doing,
