Page:Genius, and other essays.djvu/292

GENIUS AND OTHER ESSAYS to us; that we are ever approaching the spiritual sensitivity which is "all touch, all eye, all ear." The theosophist will aver that certain adepts already have reached that goal. But Professor Wendell, if we mistake not, is the first of historical writers to take the view that the witchcraft declarations are not to be repelled altogether as born of malice or delusion; that there may be conditions all about us which are entirely within nature, yet not discoverable by the normal perception of the average man. What he says upon this topic is of singular interest and affords new hints for discussion.

On the whole a graphic portraiture, largely from his own pencil, is given of the voluminous Mather—a Cambridge prodigy in youth, both of piety and learning, and of a disposition to exercise those attainments for the regulation of less-favored mortals,—a disposition which possibly is even yet not without exemplars in the places that once knew him. We see him from first to last endowed with the Puritan second-sight, familiar with apparitional imps and angels, ecstatic as Swedenborg or Böhme; of implicit credulity in his father's Remarkable Providences, and with an imagination so inflamed thereby that he unwittingly became in character, though not in power, a type of the egotist, the tyrant and the bigot. With no more appreciation of the comic than Sewall exhibits, he writes of himself and his surroundings with grotesque fidelity. His present chronicler, while rarely dilating upon the ludicrous side of his meditations, must have chuckled now and then, if not unblessed with humor, [278]