Page:The Atlantic Monthly Volume 2.djvu/498

490 The air was balmy and fragrant, and against the amber of the western sky rose and fell numberless little clouds of insects. The birds were chirping and fluttering about me, and made their arrangements for their night's lodging, in manifest dread of the clothed tree-toad who had invaded their leafy premises.

The peculiar nervousness which had taken possession of me was now passing off, to be replaced by a species of mental exaltation. I was becoming conscious of something approaching semi-clairvoyance, and yet not in the ordinary form. Sensation, emotion, thought were intensified. The landscape around me was dotted with farm-houses, pillowed in soft, dark clumps of trees. One by one, the lights began to appear at the windows,—soft rising stars of home-joys. The glorious September sunset was fading, but still resplendent in the west. The landscape was pervaded with a deeper repose, the glowing clouds with a diviner splendor than that which filled the eye. Then thronging memories awoke. My remembrances of all my past life in the crowded cities of America and Europe rose vividly before me. In the long strata of solid gray clouds, where the sun had gone down, leaving only a few vapory gold-fishes swimming in the clear spaces above, I could fancy I saw the lonely Roman Campagna and the wondrous dome of St. Peter's, as when first beheld on the horizon ten years ago. Then, as from the slopes of San Miniato at sunset, gray, red-tiled Florence, with its Boboli gardens, full of nightingales, its old towers and cathedrals, and its soaring Giotto Campanile. Then Genoa, with its terraces and marble palaces, and that huge statue of André Doria. Then Naples, gleaming white in the eye of day over her pellucid depths of sea. The golden days of Italy floated by me. Then came the memories, glad or sad, of days that had passed in my own native land,--in the very city that lay behind me,—the intimate communings with dear friends,—the musical and the merry nights,—the trials, anxieties, sorrows

But all this is very egotistical and unnecessary. I merely meant to say that I was in a peculiar, almost abnormal state of mind, that evening. The spirit had, as it were, been drawn outwards, and perhaps slightly dislocated, by those mesmeric passes of my cousin, and I had not succeeded as yet in adjusting it quite satisfactorily in its old bodily grooves and sockets. The condition I was in was not as pleasant as I could have wished; for I was as alive to painful remembrances and imaginations, as to pleasant ones. I seemed to myself like a revolving lantern of a light-house,—now dark, now glowing with a fiery radiance.

I asked myself, Is it that I have been blind and deaf and dull all my life, and am just waking into real existence? or am I developing into a medium,—Heaven forbid!—and the spirits pushing at some unguarded portal of the nervous system, and striving to take possession? Shall I hear raps and knockings when I return to my solitary chamber, and sit a powerless beholder of damaged furniture, which the spirits will never have the conscience to promise payment for, when my landlady's bill comes in? (By the way, have the spirits ever behaved like gentlemen in this respect, and settled up fair and square for the breakages they have indulged in by way of exemplifying the doctrine of a future state?)

As I soliloquized thus, I was attracted by a low vibrating note among the leaves. Looking through them, I saw, for the first time, that two or three telegraph-wires, which I had observed skirting the road, ran directly through the tree in which I was seated. It was a strange sort of sound, that came in hurried jerks, as it were, accompanied with a corresponding jerk of the wire.

A gigantic fancy flashed across me:—This State of New York is a great guitar; yonder, at Albany, are the legislative pegs and screws; down there in Manhattan Island is the great sounding-board; these iron wires are the strings! The spirits are singing, perhaps, with their heads up there in the sweet heavens and