The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 06, No. 35, September, 1860

The most melancholy case of this intellectual delirium tremens that probably ever came under the notice of any reader is found in a professed apology for the Scriptures, recently published, under the pompous and bombastic title of "COSMOGONY, OR THE MYSTERIES OF CREATION."—A volume of such puerile trash, such rubbish, twaddle, balderdash, and crazy drivelling4 as this, was never before vomited from the press of any land, and beside it the "REVELATIONS" of Andrew Jackson Davis, the "Poughkeepsie Seer," rises to the lofty grandeur of the "Novum Organon,"—a sight that makes one who really respects the Bible hang his head for shame.

The belligerent pundit who has flung in the face of peaceful geologists this octavo camouflet of his scientific lucubrations professes to have scoured the surface and ravaged the bottom (in a suit of patent sub-marine Scriptural armor) of a no less abysmal subject than the cryptology of Genesis,—to have undermined with his sapping intellect and blown up with his explosive wisdom the walled secrets of time and eternity, carrying away with him in the shape of plunder a whole cargo of the plans and purposes of the Omnipotent in the Creation. I have not the least doubt, if he were respectfully approached and interrogated upon the subject, he would answer with the greatest ease and accuracy the famous question with which Dean Swift posed the theological tailor. The man who can tell us all about the institution of the law of gravity, how the inspired prophet thought and felt while writing his history, and who knows everything respecting "affinity and attraction when they were in Creation's womb," could not hesitate a moment to measure an arch-angel for a pair of breeches.—But I was talking of funerals.

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A friend once assured me that the heartiest laugh of which he was ever guilty on a solemn occasion occurred at a funeral. A trusty Irish servant, who had lived with him for many years, and for whom he had great affection, died suddenly at his house. As he was attending the funeral in the Catholic burial-place, and stood with his wife and children listening to the service which the priest was reading, his heart filled with grief and his eyes moist with tears, the inscription on a gravestone just before him happened to attract his attention. It was this_:—"Gloria in Excelsis Deo! Patrick Donahoe died July 12. 18—." Now the exclamation-point after "Deo"_ and the statement of the fact of Mr. D.'s demise following immediately thereafter made the epitaph to read, "Glory to God in the highest! Patrick is dead." This, which at another time would perhaps have caused no more than a smile, struck him as irresistibly funny, and drove in a moment every trace of sadness from his face and sorrow from his heart,—to give place to violent emotions of another nature, which his utmost exertions could not conceal.

["I beg your pardon! I've been afloat," was the graceful parenthetical apology which a distinguished naval officer used to make, when by mistake he let drop one of "those big words which lie at the bottom of the best man's vocabulary," in conversation with sensitive persons whose ears he feared it might offend. I ought possibly, at the end of the following anecdote, to make some such excuse to the scrupulous reader, whose notions of propriety it will perhaps slightly infringe: "I beg your pardon! I couldn't help telling it."]

An eminent divine once described to me a scene he witnessed at a funeral, which he said nearly caused him to expire with—well, you shall see. An intimate acquaintance of his, who belonged to a neighboring parish, having died, he was naturally induced to assist at the burial-service. The rector of this parish was a man who, though sensitive in the extreme to the absurdities of others,—being, in fact, a regular son of Momus,—was entirely unconscious of his own amusing eccentricities. Among these, numerous and singular, he had the habit of suddenly stopping in the middle of a sentence, while preaching, and calling out to the sexton, across the church, "Dooke, turn on more gas!" or "Dooke, shut that window!" or "Dooke, do"—something else which was pretty sure to be wanting itself done during the delivery of his discourse. Nearly every Sunday, strangers not acquainted with his ways were startled out of their propriety by some such unexpected behavior.

On the occasion referred to, the funeral procession having entered the churchyard, and my informant and the officiating clergyman having taken their places at the head of the grave, the undertaker and his assistants having removed the coffin from the hearse, and the mourners, of whom there was a large crowd, having gathered into a circular audience, the Reverend Doctor – began the service.

"'Man that is born of a woman'—Oh, stop those carriages! don't you see where they are going to?" (he suddenly broke out, rushing from the place where he stood, frantically, among the bystanders; and then returning to his former position, continued,)—"'hath but a short time to live, and is full of misery. He cometh up'—Oh, don't let that coffin down yet! wait till I tell you to," (addressed to the undertaker, who was anticipating the proper place in the service,)—"'and is cut down like a flower; he fleeth as it were a shadow,'—Please to hold the umbrella a little further over my head," (sotto voce to the man who was endeavoring to protect his head from the sun,)-"'and never continueth in one stay.'—Hold the umbrella a little higher, will you?" (sotto voce again to the man holding the umbrella.)—"'In the midst of life we are in death.'—Stand down from there, boys, and be quiet!" (addressed to some urchins who were crowding and pushing one another about the grave, in their efforts to look at the coffin.) At length he had proceeded without further interruptions as far as the sentence, "'We therefore commit his body to the ground; earth to earth, ashes to ashes, dust to dust,'"—when Dooke, the sexton,—a queer, impetuous fellow,—who was vainly endeavoring to keep the boys away from the edge of the grave, seized suddenly the rope with which the coffin had just been lowered down, and, stooping forward, laid it like a whip-lash, "cut!" across the shins of a dozen youngsters, making them leap with "Oh! oh! oh!" a foot from the ground, and scatter in short order,—"'looking for the'"—(turning to my friend, as he witnessed the successful exploit of his favorite sexton, and whispering in his ear,) "Dooke made 'em hop that time, didn't he!—'general resurrection in the last day, and the life of the world to come.'"

Dooke's mode of dispersing the boys, and the officiating clergyman's comment upon it, parenthesized into the middle of the most solemn sentence of the burial-service, were too much for the usual stern gravity of my clerical friend, and, under pretence of shedding tears, he buried his face in his handkerchief and his handkerchief in his hat and shook with laughter.

Speaking of funerals reminds me of a congenial subject.—Nothing in New York astonishes visitors from the country so much as the magnificent coffin-shops, rivalling, in the ostentatious and tempting display of their wares, the most elegant stores on Broadway. Model coffins, of the latest style and pattern, are set up on end in long rows and protected by splendid show-cases, with the lids removed to exhibit their rich satin lining. Fancy coffins, decorated with glittering ornaments, are placed seductively in bright plate-glass windows, and put out for baiting advertisements upon the side-walks: as much as to say, "Walk in, walk in, ladies and gentlemen! Now's your chance! here's your fine, nice coffins!"—while in ornamental letters upon extensive placards hung about the doors, "IRON COFFINS," "ROSEWOOD COFFINS," "AIR-TIGHT COFFINS," "MAHOGANY COFFINS," "PATENT SARCOPHAGI," address the eyes and appeal to the purses of the passers-by. And I saw in one of these places, the other day, painted on glass and inclosed in an elegant gilt frame, "ICE COFFINS," which struck me as queer enough. As though it were not sufficiently cool to be dead!

It seems to me, that, in this matter, the undertakers, digging a little too deep below the surface of the present age, have thrown out some of the mystical and grotesque remains of a very antique religious faith, which look as singular just now to the eyes of common people as would an Egyptian temple with its sacred Apis in Broadway, or a Sphinx on Boston Common. To the eyes of an old Egyptian, no object could be more grateful than the sarcophagus in which he was to repose at death. He purchased it as early in life as he could raise the means, and displayed it in his parlor as an attractive and costly ornament. Indeed, I do not know but it was useful as well, and the children kept their playthings in it, or the young ladies their knitting-work and embroidery.

Are we not, in this class of our tastes and feelings, becoming rapidly Egyptianized? Why, I expect in a year or two to see coffins introduced into the parlors of the Fifth Avenue, and to find them, when their owners fail or absquatulate, advertised for sale at auction, with the rest of the household furniture, at a great sacrifice on the original cost.

"—> ONE SUPERB COFFIN OF ELEGANT PATTERN AND SUPERIOR WORKMANSHIP, AS GOOD AS NEW. TWO DITTO, SLIGHTLY DAMAGED."

And then the fashion will become popular with the less aristocratic portion of the community, and you will see crowds of servant-girls and street-loungers around the windows of our magnificent coffin-bazaars, and hear from them such exclamations as these: "Oh! do look here, Matilda! Wouldn't you like to have such a nice coffin as that?" or, "What a dear, sweet sarcophagus that one is there!" or, "Faith, I should like to own that air-tight!"

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But the day is now far advanced. The funeral processions have ceased to arrive, and the husbandmen, having sown the immortal seed furnished by the metropolis, with shovels and empty dinner-pails, are on their way, whistling and talking in groups, homeward. The number of loungers and sight-seers is rapidly diminishing as the light in the more thickly shaded walks becomes dim, and the clock at the gateway indicates the near approach of the hour when the portals will be closed.

–Alone with the dead! Alone in the night among tombs and graves! How many readers do not at the sight of these words feel an involuntary soupçon of a shudder? Would not the cause of this indefinable secret dread of the darkness which covers a graveyard be a curious matter of inquiry? Let one ever so cultivated and skeptical, familiar as a physician or a soldier with the spectacle of death, ever so full of mental and physical courage, passing alone late at night through a graveyard, hear the least sound among the graves, or see a moving object of any kind, especially a white one, and he will instantly feel an alloverishness foreign to ordinary experience, and I will not answer for him that his hair does not stand on end and his flesh grow rough as a nutmeg-grater. A company of three or four persons would feel far less disturbed. This proves the emotion to be genuine fear. And with this recognized as a fact, ask the question, Of what are you afraid? What makes your feet stick to the ground so fast, or inspires you to take to your legs and run for your life? "A ridiculous, foolish superstition," reason answers.

I do not intend by this to intimate that you, reader, bold and courageous person that I know you to be, would not dare to go through a graveyard at night. By no means. I only predicate the existence within you of this ridiculous, foolish superstition, and maintain that you would do so under all circumstances with peculiar feelings which you did not possess before you entered it and which you will not possess as soon as you have left it, and under certain circumstances with a trembling of the nerves and a palpitation of the heart, and that the occasion might occur when you would be still more strongly and strangely affected. To illustrate the latter case I have an anecdote à-propos.

A college class-mate, (Poor B–! the shadows of the Pyramids now fall upon his early grave!) a young man easily agitated, to be sure, and possibly timid, on his way home, late one autumn night, from the house of a relative in the country, was hurrying past a dismal old burying-yard in the midst of a gloomy wood, when he was suddenly startled by a strange noise a short distance from the road. Turning his head, alarmed, in the direction whence it proceeded, he was horror-struck at seeing through the darkness a white object on the ground, struggling as if in the grasp of some terrible monster. Instantly the blood froze in his veins; he stood petrified,—the howlings of the wind, clanking of chains, and groans of agony, filling his ears,—with his eyes fixed in terror upon the white shape rolling and plunging and writhing among the tombs. Attempting to run, his feet refused to move, and he swooned and fell senseless in the road. A party of travellers, happening shortly to pass, stumbled over his body. Raising him upon his feet, they succeeded by vigorous shakes in restoring him to a state of consciousness.

While explaining to them the cause of his fright, the noise was renewed. The men, although somewhat alarmed, clubbed their individual courage, climbed the wall, and found—nearly in the centre of the graveyard—an old white horse thrown down by his fetters and struggling violently to regain his feet.

B– assured me, the explanation of the spectacle instinctively occurring to his mind at the moment as indubitable was that some reprobate had just been buried there, and that the Devil, coming for his body, was engaged in binding his unwilling limbs, preparatory to carrying him away!

The reader may smile at the weakness and folly displayed in this case, but the assertion may nevertheless be safely ventured, that there is not one person in a hundred who would not under the same circumstances have been greatly disturbed, or would have invented a much less frightfully absurd solution of the phenomenon than poor B–'s.

I think the singular feelings associated with graveyard darkness, which the wisest and bravest of men find slumbering beneath all their courage and philosophy, would be found upon investigation to proceed principally from two sources,—a constitutional inclination to religious superstition, and an acquired educational belief in the reality of the dreams and fancies of poets, mingled, of course, with some natural cowardice.

The dryest and hardest men have more poetry in them than they or we begin to suspect. Indeed, if we could take our individual or collective culture to pieces and award to each separate influence its due and just share of results, I should not be surprised at finding that the poet had done more in the way of fashioning our education than the scientist or any other teacher. Milton, to give but a single example, with his speculations concerning the Fall,—its effects upon humanity, the brute creation, and physical nature,—and his imaginary conflicts between the hostile armies of heaven, and his celestial and Satanic personifications, has had so much influence in Anglo-Saxon culture, that nine-tenths of the people believe, without knowing it, as firmly in "Paradise Lost" as in the text of the Bible. The Governor of Texas, citing in his proclamation a familiar passage in Shakspeare as emanating from the inspired pen of the Psalmist, is not to so great extent an example of ignorance as an illustration of the lofty peerage instinctively assigned the great dramatist in the ordinary associations of our thoughts. This faith in the visionary world of poets is instilled into us (and it is for this reason that Rousseau, in his masterly work on education, the "Émile," reprobates the custom as promotive of superstition) in early infancy by our parents and nurses with their stories of nymphs, fairies, elves, dwarfs, giants, witches, hobgoblins, and the like fabulous beings, and, as soon as we are able to read, by the tales of genii, sorcerers, demons, ghouls, enchanted caves and castles, and monsters and monstrosities of every name. The exceedingly impressible and poetical nature of children (for all children are poets and talk poetry as soon as they can lisp) appropriates and absorbs with intense relish these fanciful myths, and for years they believe more firmly in their truth than in the realities of the actual world. And I more than suspect that this child-credulity rather slumbers in the grown man, smothered beneath superimposed skepticisms and cognitions, than is ever eradicated from his mind, and thus, upon the shock of an emergency disturbing him suddenly to the foundation, is ready to burst up through the crevices of his shattered practical experience and appear on the surface of his judgment and understanding.

In addition, then, to an instinctive tendency to religious superstition, (of which I shall here say nothing,) to the fairy mythology of the nursery, and the phantom machinery invented by poets to clothe with the semblance of reality their dreams and fancies, can be traced in a great measure the existence in the mind of the credulity which renders the fear in question possible, opening an introduction for it into the heart excited by inexplicable phenomena or circumstanced where such phenomena might, according to our superstitious beliefs, easily occur.

Without entering into an analysis of the fear itself, beyond the remark that any extraordinary sight or sound not immediately explicable by the eye or ear to the understanding (as a steamboat to the Indians or a comet to our ancestors) is a legitimate cause of the emotion, as well as the possibility of the occurrence of such sights and sounds, for believing which we have seen man prepared, first by natural superstitious inclination, and secondly by a peculiar education,—I will only further add, for the purpose of a brief introduction to an anecdote I wish to relate, that there is another fountain of knowledge, from which we drink at a later period than childhood, as well as then, whose waters are strongly impregnated with this superstitious, fear-provoking credulity: I mean the stories of ghosts which have been seen and heard in all ages and countries, revealing important secrets, pointing out the places where murder has been committed or treasure concealed, foretelling deaths and calamities, and forewarning men of impending dangers. Hundreds of books familiar to all have been written upon this subject and form an extensive department of our literature, especially of our older literature.

The philosopher attempts to account for such phenomena by referring them to optical illusions or a disordered condition of the brain, making them subjective semblances instead of objective realities. But one is continually being puzzled and perplexed with evidence contradicting this hypothesis, which, upon any other subject a priori credible to the reason and judgment, would be received as satisfactory and decisive without a moment's hesitation. In truth, with all the light which science is able to shed upon it, and all the resolute shutting of the eyes at points which no elucidating theory is available to explain, there are facts in this department of supernaturalism which stagger the unbelief of the stoutest skeptic.

It is constantly urged, among other objections to the credibility of supernatural apparitions, that the names of the witnesses have singularly and suspiciously disappeared,—that you find them, upon investigation, substantiated thus: A very worthy gentleman told another very worthy gentleman, who told a very intelligent lady, who told somebody else, who told the individual who finally communicated the incident to the world. There are, however, as just intimated, instances in which such ambiguity is altogether wanting. Among these is one so well authenticated by well-known witnesses of undoubted veracity, that, having never before been published, I venture to relate it here.

My informant was Professor Tholuck, of Halle University, the most eminent living theologian in Germany, and the principal ecclesiarch of the Prussian Church. He prefaced the account by assuring me that it was received from the lips of De Wette himself, immediately after the occurrence,—that De Wette was an intimate personal friend, a plain, practical man, of remarkably clear and vigorous intellect, with no more poetry and imagination in his nature than just sufficient to keep him alive,—in a word, that he would rely upon his coolness of judgment and accuracy of observation, under any possible combination of circumstances, as confidently as upon those of any man in the world.

Dr. De Wette, the famous German Biblical critic, returning home one evening between nine and ten o'clock, was surprised, upon arriving opposite the house in which he resided, to see a bright light burning in his study. In fact, he was rather more than surprised; for he distinctly remembered to have extinguished the candles when he went out, an hour or two previously, locked the door, and put the key in his pocket, which, upon feeling for it, was still there. Pausing a moment to wonder by what means and for what purpose any one could have entered the room, he perceived the shadow of a person apparently occupied about something in a remote corner. Supposing it to be a burglar employed in rifling his trunk, he was upon the point of alarming the police, when the man advanced to the window, into full view, as if for the purpose of looking out into the street. It was De Wette himself!—the scholar, author, professor,—his height, size, figure, stoop,—his head, his face, his features, eyes, mouth, nose, chin, every one,—skullcap, study-gown, neck-tie, all, everything: there was no mistaking him, no deception whatever: there stood Dr. De Wette in his own library, and he out in the street:—why, he must be somebody else! The Doctor instinctively grasped his body with his hands, and tried himself with the psychological tests of self-consciousness and identity, doubtful, if he could believe his senses and black were not white, that he longer existed his former self, and stood, perplexed, bewildered, and confounded, gazing at his other likeness looking out of the window. Upon the person's retiring from the window, which occurred in a few moments, De Wette resolved not to dispute the possession of his study with the other Doctor before morning, and ringing at the door of a house opposite, where an acquaintance resided, he asked permission to remain over night.

The chamber occupied by him commanded a full view of the interior of his library, and from the window he could see his other self engaged in study and meditation, now walking up and down the room, immersed in thought, now sitting down at the desk to write, now rising to search for a volume among the book-shelves, and imitating in all respects the peculiar habits of the great Doctor engaged at work and busy with cogitations. At length, when the cathedral clock had finished striking through first four and then eleven strokes, as German clocks are wont to do an hour before twelve, De Wette Number Two manifested signs of retiring to rest,—took out his watch, the identical large gold one the other Doctor in the other chamber felt sure was at that moment safe in his waistcoat-pocket, and wound it up, removed a portion of his clothing, came to the window, closed the curtains, and in a few moments the light disappeared. De Wette Number One, waiting a little time until convinced that Number Two had disposed himself to sleep, retired also his-self to bed, wondering very much what all this could mean.

Rising the next morning, he crossed the street, and passed up-stairs to his library. The door was fastened; he applied the key, opened it, and entered. No one was there; everything appeared in precisely the same condition in which he had left it the evening before,—his pen lying upon the paper as he had dropped it on going out, the candles on the table and the mantel-piece evidently not having been lighted, the window-curtains drawn aside as he had left them; in fine, there was not a single trace of any person's having been in the room. "Had he been insane the night before? He must have been. He was growing old; something was the matter with his eyes or brain; anyhow, he had been deceived, and it was very foolish of him to have remained away all night." Endeavoring to satisfy his mind with some such reflections as these, he remembered he had not yet examined his bed-room. Almost ashamed to make the search, now convinced it was all an hallucination of the senses, he crossed the narrow passageway and opened the door. He was thunderstruck. The ceiling, a lofty, massive brick arch, had fallen during the night, filling the room with rubbish and crushing his bed into atoms. De Wette the Apparition had saved the life of the great German scholar.