Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 8.djvu/190

 178 of his profession, and often spent a large portion of the night in practising difficult compositions. The violin was his favorite instrument. At last the shepherd-girl fell ill, and was removed to a charitable institution. Here the attendants were amazed at hearing the most exquisite music in the night, in which were recognized finely-rendered passages from the best works of the old masters. The sounds were traced to the shepherd-girl's room, where the patient was found playing the violin in her sleep. Awake, she knew nothing of these things, and exhibited no capacity for music.

A late number of the London Medico-Chirurgical Review, in an article on apoplexy, speaks of vivid dreams as a common warning in the first and often unrecognized stages of insanity, heart-disease, and phthisis, and one that it would be well to better understand and heed. Vivid dreaming, which in some cases seems to be a mental illumination, and in others a prophecy of impending ill, precedes many diseases long before the victim is aware of his condition. These dreams sometimes take the forms of waking fancies, double consciousness, and what is called mystic memory. In February, 1829, when Sir Walter Scott was breaking himself down by severe and protracted literary labor, and was suffering the first invasion of ill health which ultimately ended in death, he wrote in his diary on the 17th, that, on the preceding day, at dinner, although in company with two or three old friends, he was strongly haunted by a "sense of preëxistence," a confused idea that nothing that passed was said for the first time; that the same topics had been discussed, and that the same persons had expressed the same opinions before. "There was," he writes, "a vile sense of a want of reality in all that I did or said." Goethe relates that, as he was once in an uneasy and unhealthy state of mind, riding along a foot-path toward Drusenheim, he saw himself on horseback coming toward himself; and similar stories are told of other highly-imaginative persons whose mental balance has been disturbed by over-anxiety or incipient illness.

The states of physical prostration known as coma somnolentum and coma vigil exhibit, in their largest extent, the poetic capacities of the mind. The impressions, dreams, and illusions, in these conditions, are such as no healthy mind could possibly conceive. The patient seems to live in a charmed world, amid spectral beings and airy people, changing lights, luminous heights, and appalling shadows; in short, no glowing epic or work of the painter's art seems so much as to touch upon such richness of imagery. Mrs. Hemans on her death-bed said that no pen could describe or imagination conceive the visions that passed before her mind, and made her waking hours more delightful than those spent in repose.

Rev. William Tennent, of Freehold, New Jersey, was an overworked student, and was supposed to be far gone in consumption. In a protracted illness he apparently died, and the preparations were made