There is one point, however, which seems to tell startlingly for the ancient or objective side of the question. After the visitation, it is not uncommon to find the place upon which the monster had appeared to sit, swollen and discoloured, sometimes even excoriated and bleeding, presenting, in short, every appearance of having been really subjected to the pressure of a bruising or galling weight: nay, in some cases, the impression of the very form of the demon, as seen by the sufferer in his dream (the print of feet, the indenture of haunches, &c.), has been plainly visible on the skin. Doctor van Duffel, or Druffel-we have seen the name written both ways-—is our authority on this point. Here is what he says:

"In a half-waking or intersomnious condition, you behold a monster of some kind, a goblin, a fiery horse, a wild, gigantic man, glide slowly towards you. This apparition sets itself on the pit of your stomach, and presses you with such a crushing weight, that you can neither breathe nor move a limb. After the affection are often to be seen livid marks (sugillationes), some affirm actual impressions of the figure of the goblin or monster, on the place where it sat."

And Doctor Ennemoser also speaks of the same thing as matter of long experience and notoriety.

Nor, however it seems to clash with received notions of spiritual essences, are we without evidence of the power of other spirits than the nightmare, to leave on the human body material traces of their operation. Lillbopp, a writer every way worthy of credit, says:

"A certain person saw a spectre lay hold of him, and, after the same was vanished, he yet felt, in the part so laid hold of, a pain which lasted many days; in other such cases also have swellings and other marks of lesion been observed."

And the same writer further remarks:

"It is not easy to reason a person who has had such an experience out of the belief in a preternatural agency, seeing he can in no other way explain to himself the fixed pain and the swelling."

You prove to him that it is impossible, but his pinches testify, in legible

black and blue, as well as in very intelligible tinglings, that, possible or not, it is fact.

And Doctor van Druffel, or Duffel, already cited, depones in the Berlin Ecclesiastical Journal, and says:

"I myself know a person who affirms that a ghost, which he was compelled to carry some distance on his shoulders, in broad daylight, left livid-blue marks, as of bruises, on the parts which its buttocks had pressed, which marks he also afterwards showed to me and to others. Now," (proceeds the Doctor,) "as to these sugillations, which the nightmare produces, I can appeal for the truth of them to known experience. It by no means follows, however, that a veritable, objectively present spirit has produced these bruises. We may with confidence assume, that the phantasy, excited to a magical activity through the local afflux of blood, first subtrudes a goblin as cause, and then by a like magical reaction effects an extravasation of blood in the part subjected to pressure."

Another great authority on such points, the learned Frederick von Meyer, of Frankfort, does not in this fully agree with Doctor van Duffel. The nightmare, as this author thinks, may indeed be a mere phantasm or psychic image, devoid of all proper objectivity; but it is just as possible that it may be a personal subsistence, as the popular belief will have it. He calls on intelligent patients and unprejudiced physicians to lay before the public accurate accounts of the affection, as it occurs in their own experience, and thus to furnish persons versed in ghostly matters, and who have experimental knowledge of the invisible world, with data to decide upon its natural or supernatural character. To which purpose the learned author proceeds to throw in his own mite of information, assuring us that a lady so visited has described the sensation to him, as being distinctly that of the pressure of a hairy body, as of an ape or other beast.

Certainly, there is no one in or out of Germany that knows so much about Nightmares, and such problematical entities, as Frederick von Meyer; nevertheless, Doctor Ennemoser is not agreed with him. Doctor Ennemoser is a philosopher,'and will not hear of an objective Nightmare. The

"sugillations" do not puzzle him. Medical history, he informs us, offers many examples of the power of thought to produce wounds on the surface of the body, in parts to which it is intently directed, the mere inward imagining of an injury in a particular place working the injury imagined. The explanation of this he finds in "the plastic force of phantasy, the essence of which, as poetic shaping power, consists in the realizing of ideal representations, wherein the soul of man can do much even unto his own body." "The animal soul (psyche)," says the Doctor

"unconsciously copies in the germinal matter contained in the blood the images presented to it, whether by the senses from without, or by the thought from within, embossing or engraving them upon the outer surface of the body. For the ideal, the supersensuous, ever seeks to acquire form, to give an impress of itself in the sensible; and when the outward sense is now locked up in torpor, and the inward awakes in vision and ecstacy, then is the moment in which the shapes that occupy the dreaming soul can copy themselves off without disturbance can model themselves in the passive materiality of the body.

surfaces.

The spiritual picture, or intuition of the inward sense, reflects itself out of the camera obscura of the brain, through the nerves as light-conductors, upon the curtain of the skin, wholly according to the physical laws by which impressions of light embody themselves on opaque That the reflex of the inner picture is produced chiefly on the outer skin has a natural ground; the nerves of feeling are the antithesis of the nerves of sight. . In magnetic clairvoyance the sense of feeling sometimes acts vicariously, through the nerves of the skin, for its pole, the sense of sight, and there is no point of the surface of the body with which somnambulists have not seen.'

Thus, as the thought is directed to a particular point, the blood rushes in fuller surges in the same direction, furnishing the plastic matter out of which the magical shaping power, the artist and prophet within us, creates works before which our own understanding, as well as that of others, stands baffled, and can but muse in "expressive silence." How vividhow far more vivid than all objective pictures which the eye brings him

from the outward world-is that ideal picture which the artist has within him, which is a part of himself, and which reproduces itself by his hands on canvas or in marble! Nearer to him than the objects that press most importunately on his sense, clearer in his soul, and more sharply struck off than all that is most defined and palpable in the material region around him, it works upon his mind with a power against which all external solicitings of sense prevail nothing. Happy was Blake, who lived in good understanding with the artist within him, and whose ready pencil transferred the unearthly creations of this latter to insensible canvas, instead of receiving them on his own sensitive skin. The pencil was the conductor, which carried off innocuous the destructivecreative force, the lightning that would have smitten and fused his own corporeality into new anomalous fantastic forms. It is good when he who is subjectively an artist is one also objectively when the inward openness to the influences of an ideal world, goes hand in hand with the capability of transmitting those influences-of mediating their operation upon the world without, instead of arresting them within your own being, and becoming yourself their passive object, when you ought to be their subject, their minister and co-operating instrument. Had Blake not been able to paint his nightmares, and his daymares too, they would have painted themselves in wizard-marks upon his own body.

Claude de Tisserant, who in the year 1775, wrote a book De Prodigiis, relates therein the following:

"The wife of a member of the parlia ment of Provence in a dream saw her husband beheaded, which also really took place at the same time at Paris. Awaking in a passion of terror at the cruel spectacle, she found her hand convulsively shut, so that she was unable to open it; and when it was with main force opened by her maids, there was found on the palm the perfect image of her husband, with his head cut off, and this bled like the wounds of the stigmatized."

"Madame V., of N, saw one nigh', in a very lively dreain, a person who offered her a white and a red rose, bidding her choose one of them. She chose the red. When she awoke she felt a vehement burning in one arm, and by degrees there formed itself on the spot so affected, the perfect picture of a red rose, which appeared embossed on the skin, like a mole. On the eighth day this rose was in its most perfect state, both as to drawing and colour; it became thenceforth daily paler, and less defined, and after fourteen days no trace of it remained. This well authenticated fact forms an important contribution to the history of the stigmata."

These cases show how much deeper a significance than we think of lies in the phrase, so often in our mouths, "the power of the imagination." The imagination is a power which we little understand: it is a truly creative power, and is not ours, but we are its. Yea, the most powerful workings of the imagination are those of which the imagining subject is not conscious, wherein a higher, universal power, the "soul of the world," imagines in and by him, and works very miracles. But the ordinary creations of imagination are only subjective: then when ecstacy comes in with her help, they become objective. Which is the rationale of all magic. Maja, in the Indian mythology, the everlasting mother of things, is nothing else than the divine imagination, the source of all forms; as the divine reason—the father of things -is of all essences.

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The poet, or artist generally, is a conductor of the power of imagination, open to receive it from aboveopen to transmit it netherward. madman is a poet, in whom the force of divine imagination meets not free course-in whom the divine dream, which he should be the medium of realizing in the world without him, is arrested, painting itself in his own soul, as those nightmare-images paint themselves on the body, instead of being by him sung, or painted, to others, as Blake painted his dream-shapes, and so put them forth out of himself.

Aristotle, in his book De Animalibus, relates that a hen, having vanquished a cock in fight, acquired, by the force of imagination, ever dwelling on this victory, a comb and spurs.

How effects such as those related

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above are, in moments of strong emotion, produced even in a waking state, we have many instances. The painful effect upon the nerves, occasioned by hearing a stuttering person talk, manifests itself in irritable temperaments, by similar stuttering on the part of the hearer. hement sympathy you imitate involuntarily the gestures of the person who is the object of the emotionthe movements of an orator who carries you with him, or of a person in danger whom you cannot help. In the following case, sympathy produced still more marked effects:

"On the entry of the French into Moscow, and during the desperate attempt made by some lingering inha bitants of the sacred city' to defend the Kremlin, a French soldier, being hard pressed by a Cossack, was, after a running fight of the length of a street or so, driven into a certain blind alley,' or court without thoroughfare, and here stood at bay. A citizen, who had turned into this same alley to avoid meeting the combatants, and now could not get out, fell at the sight of the con. flict into an ecstacy of fear, and stood there charmed, beholding all as it were in a dreadful waking dream, or state of nightmare. When the Frenchman in his turn had driven the Cossack out of the alley, and the citizen, somewhat recovered from his panic, had got to his own house, there were found on his arms and other parts of his body bleeding gashes, such as he had seen given, and received, so that he stood in need of surgical help, and kept his bed some days."

What the effect on this sympathizing soul would have been, had the Cossack cut off the Frenchman's head, one trembles to calculate.

But we have cases on record, of similar effects of sympathy, where the object of the emotion was out of the range of sensuous cognizance, and where, consequently, magnetic ecstacy must have been present, and clairvoyance supplied the place of ordinary vision.

In the life of St. Suso, by Gorres, it is related that this holy person, who was remarkable for the austerity of his penances, on a certain occasion smote himself so pitilessly with the scourge as to lay open a bloodvessel.

"At the same time, and in the same hour that he so smote himself, a holy maid, whose name was Anna, was at her prayers in another city, and had a vision, or ecstacy, wherein she was led in spirit to the town where Suso was administering to himself the discipline. As she beheld the cruel stripes, she was taken with such a passion of pity that she drew near to him, and as his arm was uplifted to deal himself a stroke, she interposed her own person, and received the blow on her arm. Thus it seemed to her in her vision. And when she came to herself, there was just such a welt, livid and bleeding, upon her arm, as if the scourge had really stricken her, instead of Suso. Which mark she retained for a long time, with great pain."

Tha following somewhat similar case (which differs from the foregoing only inasmuch as here the sympathy rests upon natural, instead of religious affection) is related by

Doctor Pabst :

"The sister of a soldier who was condemned to run the gauntlet, being at the time of the execution at home in the midst of her family, was sensible of the stripes which her brother received, and in a kind of ecstacy moaned and cried, as if under the lash, until at length she fell down in a swoon, and was carried to bed, when, on stripping her, they found her back piteously ploughed with stripes, from which also blood was trickling.

To this category belong incontestably the workings of the imagination of a pregnant woman upon the being that forms itself within her; the affections of the mother permanently incorporate themselves in the body of the child. This was well known to the Spartans, who therefore brought their women during the time of pregnancy into the presence of none but beautiful objects, and the Spartan forms furnished to the chisel of a Phidias, a Praxiteles, and a Deixippus, models worthy of those divine ideals which they helped to realize.

Howshipp relates that a woman in the fourth month of her preg nancy, as she attempted to cross a river in winter, was thrown by the cracking and rending of the ice into violent anxiety and fear. In the seventh month she brought a child into the world, whose integuments

seemed to be torn and rent in all directions. The margins of the rents receded from each other, here more, there less cicatrization had commenced on all of them, but was in none yet completed.

In such cases, and they might be multiplied to no end-the dream of the brooding soul is broken in upon; she is startled into consciousness, and for a moment becomes, herself, artist, instead of instrument, organ of the world-artists working. Hurriedly she paints from the picture before her, marring the fair work of that world-artist, which is painted from an eternal pattern. That world-artist is Maja, the "mother of things," the soul of the world, the Divine Imagination, whose dream are we, who imageth us to herself, and to ourselves, and imageth herself in us. We spoke, above, of workings of the imagination, of which the imagining subject is not conscious, wherein a higher, universal power, the "soul of the world," imagines in and by him, and works miracles. Of such miracles, the formation of a life within a life-of a life out of a life, is the highest. Of like miraculous imaginative working we have an example, in the power of some of the lower animals, as the polypus, to replace limbs that have been cut away; and we have experience of something akin to it in ourselves, in so familiar a phenomenon as the closing and healing of a wound, or the knitting of a broken bone. In all these operations, the unconscious psychic power of imagination is at work; and it will not carry on two of them together, the fractured bone of a woman in pregnancy will not knit so long as the child is unborn; not till after the birth does the ordinary callus form itself. For, to all magical operations, an undistracted intention, as well as attention, is required. The mightiest enchanter cannot work two enchantments at once.

Something strange and awful glimmers up, out of profoundest horror and gloom, in that observation of Testa, who found in the body of a great criminal a heart deformed by preternatural membranes and hairlike fibres, and who remarks that such unnatural misformations and

monstrosities of structure are often found in the hearts of malefactors. Riolan found, on the dissection of a man of very vicious life, the substance of the heart cartilaginous. It would appear that there is more in the phrase, "a bad heart," than people generally mean. Do our sins, then, harden our hearts, physically as well as morally? More germane to our subject seems the well-avouched fact, that persons touched by the King of France, for glandular swellings, were really healed, and that warts, and the like, are to this day, and every day, cured by what are called sympathetic means, which act upon the imagination.

The cases which have recently attracted so much attention in the Tyrol, find, like those above cited, the key to their mystery in this power of imagination, and assimilative energy of sympathy. The nun Emerich, from her youth up very sickly and devout, had already before entering the cloister a vision of one who, in the form of a shining youth, offered for her choice a wreath of flowers in the left hand, and a crown of thorns in the right. She grasped at the latter, pressed it with fervour on her head, but on coming to herself, felt, round the whole head, a violent pain, which was accompanied with bleeding. And the wounds in the hands, feet, side, and brow, as well of this nun as of Maria Morl of Caldaro, or Kaltern and Domenica Lazzari of Capriana, further exemplify the plastic power of the soul over the body, whereby the latter becomes the involuntary mirror of the former-yea, its photogenic plate, giving local permanence to the images which it (the soul) fixedly contemplates.

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The Legend of the Saints" tells of thirty-two persons who have had the stigmata; among whom the first and most illustrious is St. Francis of Assisi. The manner in which this holy person received these marks, is another proof of the power of sympathy, through the ministry of the imagination, to pass out from the spiritual into the bodily region of our being. It is thus related by Thomas of Celano :

"Being in a solitude two years be

fore his death (it was on the feast of the elevation of the cross), he beheld in a vision a man, like a seraph with six wings, who with outstretched hands, and feet bound together, was fastened to a cross. Two wings lifted themselves over the head, two were stretched out as for flying, and two covered the whole body. This sight filled the servant of God with the highest joy, yet he knew not what the vision might signify. He rejoiced at the glorious aspect of the seraph; but the condition of the heavenly being on the cross, and the bitterness of the sufferings, terrified him. Troubled in mind, he considered what the vision might mean, and exercised his spirit with painful efforts to comprehend it. While he now vainly strove and wrestled for understanding of this, and the novelty of the vision moved him profoundly, behold! the marks of the nails began to show themselves also in his hands and feet, as he had observed them in that man in his vision."