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FEMALE NOVELISTS.
No. VIII.—Mrs. Crowe.
In that shadowy borderland which separates the things which are seen and temporal, from the things which are unseen and eternal—where the eye dwells on a swarth canopy of clouds, and the ear catches stray cadences of ineffable speech, and the feet stumble on the dark mountains—there, on the Night-side of Nature, loves Mrs. Crowe to pitch her tent. Thence she dispenses her dark sayings—thence publishes her revelations of matters in heaven and earth not dreamt of in our philosophy, or dreamt of only as a dream.
Rich are her walks with supernatural cheer:
The region of her inner spirit teems
With vital sounds and monitory gleams
Of high astonishment, and pleasing fear.[1]
Montaigne tells us he was once tainted with that presumptuous arrogance which slights and condemns all things for false that do not appear to us likely to be true—the ordinary vice of such as fancy themselves wiser than their neighbours; and that if he heard talk of dead folks walking, of prophecies, enchantments, witchcrafts, or kindred story of somnia, terrores magicos, portentaque Thessala, he refused credit point-blank, and pitied the credulous vulgar who were abused by such follies; "whereas I now find,” quoth the older-and-wiser-grown Gascon, "that I was to be pitied at least as much as they; not that experience has taught me to supersede my former opinion, though my curiosity has endeavoured that way; but reason has instructed me that thus resolutely to condemn anything for false and impossible is to circumscribe and limit the will of God and the power of nature within the bounds of my own capacity, than which no folly can be greater."[2] And such a position of suspense, of readiness to investigate and slowness to repudiate à priori, is the mental status upon which Mrs. Crowe insists, at the very least, is essential to every student or observer of the mysterious. Her illustrations of this subject, her contributions to the romance of dream-land and ghost-seeing, are instinct with cordial good faith, so positive and real that her readers are commonly moved to go some way with her, and to commune each, one with himself, after being plied with her accumulations of stirring evidence, in the poet's strain:
Dare I say
No spirit ever brake the band
That stays him from the native land
Where first hie walk'd when clasp'd in clay?[3]
The veriest sceptic in these matters, to whom a ghost is airy humbug, and a dream dyspepsia, and presentiment a cunningly-devised fable, and mesmerism a preposterous sham, will yet hardly escape the influence of a qualified sympathy while perusing one of Mrs. Crowe's best tales of terror, and will incline to pay her the compliment of saying,
C'est à vous de rêver et de faire des songes,
Puisqu'en vous il est faux que songes sont mensonges.[4]
