XXXIV. Bigher Agencies in Death. "On all, the unutterable stillness lies, Of that dread hour when man must meet his God, WILLIAMS. A VERY deep conviction of something in death which extends beyond death, has always disposed the human mind to associate with it an interest on the side of higher and invisible agencies. It has been believed, also, to call out in the soul itself more hidden and mysterious connections with the unseen universe. The mind, in some states, can even weaken and dissolve the links that bind it to the body; and the exhibition of such a power might well prepare us for disclosures still more wonderful. Death from a broken heart is not a fiction. It has too often occurred to leave us at liberty to sport with so frail a vessel as the life of man. The excitement of strong passion has many a time resulted in the sudden and fatal rupture of some one of the channels of circulation. Men have thus fallen dead under mighty irritation, or from sudden fright, or even, it is said, in excess of joy. A violent passion hurried on the death of Henry the Second of England; and the Emperor Valentinian fell senseless in a fit of anger, and never arose. Some have sunk in the moment of uttering blasphemy, or perjury; and perhaps the providential doom was executed through the prompt reaction of remorse and terror. Still more often, the mind receives a shock, through which the bodily system is not at once broken up, but is made peculiarly accessible to some mortal disease. Margaret, the wife of King Malcolm Canmore, was sick when she heard of his fall, and died of grief almost immediately. The defeat at Solway evidently threw James the Fifth into an extreme depression, which issued in a slow fever and in death. But, without the distinct intervention of disease, life has closed under the operation of extreme sorrow. On an inquest in England, in 1846, it appeared that a woman, whose husband had suddenly died, declared at once, in the violence of her distress, that she would not outlive him; and actually expired within four hours. It may have been by a similar influence of the spirit on the body, when the tie to life was weak, that aged persons have so often expired on their birthdays, or, like three of our chief rulers, on some interesting anniversary. If the mind have power to produce or hasten death, much more may it be held capable of receiving intimations of its approach, apart entirely from bodily symptoms. The idea of occasional presentiments of this kind has everywhere been found, and implies no improbability. It is true, that the number of unfounded and unfulfilled presentiments would surpass all calculation; but some of those which have been indeed fulfilled, are so striking and peculiar as to be quite decisive. That such a man as Lord Byron should say, weeping, "Something tells me I shall never return from Greece,' might perhaps be explained by the power of an excited, saddened, and highly poetic imagination. But Napier, by no means a superstitious writer, mentioning two instances of such a presentiment in officers who fell at the action of the Nivelle, speaks of it as "that strange anticipation of coming death, so often felt by military men." When Bonaparte was before Toulon, the wife of an officer begged that he might be excused from some service. Bonaparte was inexorable. The officer, a brave man, had a presentiment of his fall, and, when the attack began, he trembled, and turned pale. "Take care," said Napoleon, "there is a bomb-shell coming.' He stooped, and was severed in two; and his commander told the story with a laugh in Paris. Headley mentions a young midshipman, assassinated at Mahon, who went on shore under the strongest presentiment that he should be attacked, though the origin of the affair was subsequent and purely accidental. Sick persons have predicted, at a considerable distance, the very day of their decease. Such was the prediction of the aged Countess Purgstall, when she entreated her guest, Captain Hall, who relates the fact, to remain a certain number of days longer at her castle: he saw no reason to believe her end to be at hand; and yet she died just within the time which she had designated. It was confidently stated that a divine of Boston, who fell by apoplexy, had on the same day foretold his death. The second Lord Lyttleton dreamed that he should die at a certain hour, and at that hour he died; and these presentiments assume often the form of dreams. Borrow relates that, in the vessel in which he entered the Tagus, a seaman at his side said, "I have just had a strange dream, that I fell from the cross-trees into the sea;" and, the moment after, being ordered aloft, he actually fell, and was drowned. A Jesuit missionary in South America relates the baptism of an Indian, who just before had dreamed that his deceased mother and sister had visited him and directed him to be baptized, as he was about to come to them; and who, without apparent disease, died the same evening. A young Esquimaux, who was brought to Scotland, and died at Edinburgh, said, just before, that his sister had just appeared to him, and called him away. In 1777, a pious woman died in Connecticut, at the age of ninetynine, and on her birthday. She had often told that, twenty years before, a venerable and comely person, whom she used to call her guardian angel, appeared to her in a dream, and informed her that she should live to be ninety-nine, and then die. The multitude of such narratives, some of which almost every one has heard from private sources, can hardly be explained without supposing some foundation in fact and in nature. Certainly, too, the Holy Scriptures teach that mode of viewing the time of departure, which regards it as the subject of special determinations. "The very hairs of our head are all numbered;" and of the Saviour it is repeatedly said, that His time was not yet come;" a language which must be thus justified in its application to all whose life and death He partook. Whether any have been warned of their approaching end, by direct interposition of spirits from the invisible world, we have, perhaps, no sufficient evidence, except in the instance of King Saul. But it seems established that either the departing spirit itself, or some other unseen agency, or some secret sympathy of nature, has often, at the very time of departure, or immediately after, given intimation of the change to a distant survivor. To a belief of such a warning in dreams, Homer seems to allude: 66 Thy distant wife, Egiale the fair, Starting from sleep with a distracted air, Shall rouse thy slaves, and her lost lord deplore, Robert of Normandy, son of William the Conqueror, is said to have one morning exclaimed, weeping, to his attendants at Cardiff, where he was imprisoned, "My son is dead;" saying, that in his dream he had seen him slain with a lance; and the fact was, that he had just been mortally wounded in Flanders, by a lance which slightly pierced his finger. Philip de Comines says, that the Archbishop of Vienne said to Louis the Eleventh, immediately after mass, "Sir, your mortal enemy is dead," just at the time when Charles of Burgundy had been slain by the Swiss in battle. Ben Jonson told Drummond of Hawthornden that he saw, in a vision, his child, then in London, with a bloody cross on his forehead, as if cut with a sword; and presently came tidings from his wife of the death of the boy by the plague. Walton tells a similar story of an apparition of the wife of Donne to her husband, with a dead child in her arms, near the very hour when she gave birth to a stillborn infant. Lord Bacon says, that when his father died, he was in France, and, two or three days before, dreamed that he saw the countryhouse of his father covered with black mortar. The Earl of Roscommon, when a boy in France, suddenly exclaimed, "My father is dead;" and the fact was soon brought by letters. The eloquent Buckminster of Boston died suddenly. On the next morning, his father, in New Hampshire, himself dying, exclaimed, "My son Joseph is dead!" and when those who stood around assured him that it was a dream, he said solemnly, "It is no dream, he is dead;" and presently expired. A sea-captain related to Lord Byron, that he had himself awoke in the night, feeling a wet form stretched across him, which he discovered to be that of his brother in his naval uniform; and that, months after, he learned |