CHAPTER XXX.
MAGNETISM.--SYMPATHY.--THE RETURN OF ELEMENTS TO ELEMENTS.
Daily did the health of Volktman decline; Lucilla was the only one
ignorant of his danger. She had never seen the gradual approaches of
death: her mother's abrupt and rapid illness made the whole of her
experience of disease. Physicians and dark rooms were necessarily coupled
in her mind with all graver maladies; and as the astrologer, wrapt in his
calculations, altered not any of his habits, and was insensible to pain,
she fondly attributed his occasional complaints to the melancholy induced
by seclusion. With sedentary men, diseases being often those connected
with the Organisation of the heart, do not usually terminate suddenly: it
was so with Volktman.
One day he was alone with Godolphin, and their conversation turned upon
one of the doctrines of the old Magnetism, a doctrine which, depending as
it does so much upon a seeming reference to experience, survived the rest
of its associates, and is still not wholly out of repute among the wild
imaginations of Germany.
"One of the most remarkable and abstruse points in what students call
metaphysics," said Volktman, "is sympathy! the first principle, according
to some, of all human virtue. It is this, say they, which makes men just,
humane, charitable. When one who has never heard of the duty of assisting
his neighbour, sees another drowning, he plunges into the water and saves
him. Why? because involuntarily, and at once, his imagination places
himself in the situation of the stranger: the pain he would experience in
the watery death glances across him: from this pain he hastens,--without
analysing its cause, to deliver himself.
"Humanity is thus taught him by sympathy: where is this sympathy
placed?--in the nerves: the nerves are the communicants with outward
nature; the more delicate the nerves, the finer the sympathies; hence,
women and children are more alive to sympathy than men. Well, mark me: do
not these nerves have attraction and sympathy---not only with human
suffering, but with the powers of what is falsely termed inanimate nature?
Do not the wind, the influences of the weather and the seasons, act
confessedly upon them? and if one part of nature, why not another,
inseparably connected too with that part? If the weather and seasons have
sympathy with the nerves, why not the moon and the stars, by which the
weather and the seasons are influenced and changed? Ye of the schools may
allow that sympathy originates some of our actions; I say it governs the
whole world--the whole creation! Before the child is born, it is this
secret affinity which can mark and stamp him with the witness of his
mother's terror or his mother's desire."
"Yet," said Godolphin, "you would scarcely, in your zeal for sympathy,
advocate the same cause as Edricius Mohynnus, who cured wounds by a
powder, not applied to the wound, but to the towel that had been dipped in
its blood?"
"No," answered Volktman: "it is these quacks and pretenders that have
wronged all sciences, by clamouring for false deductions. But I do
believe of sympathy, that it has a power to transport ourselves out of the
body and reunite us with the absent. Hence, trances, and raptures, in
which the patient, being sincere, will tell thee, in grave earnestness,
and with minute detail, of all that he saw, and heard, and encountered,
afar off, in other parts of the earth, or even above the earth. As thou
knowest the accredited story of the youth, who, being transported with a
vehement and long-nursed desire to see his mother, did, through that same
desire, become as it were rapt, and beheld her, being at the distance of
many miles, and giving and exchanging signs of their real and bodily
conference."
Godolphin turned aside to conceal an involuntary smile at this grave
affirmation; but the mystic, perhaps perceiving it, continued yet more
eagerly:--
"Nay, I myself, at times, have experienced such trance, if trance it be;
and have conversed with them who have passed from the outward earth--with
my father and my wife. And," continued he, after a moment's pause, "I do
believe that we may, by means of this power of attraction--this elementary
and all-penetrative sympathy, pass away, in our last moments, at once into
the bosom of those we love. For, by the intent and rapt longing to behold
the Blest and to be amongst them, we may be drawn insensibly into their
presence, and the hour being come when the affinity between the spirit and
the body shall be dissolved, the mind and desire, being so drawn upward,
can return to earth no more. And this sympathy, refined and extended,
will make, I imagine, our powers, our very being, in a future state. Our
sympathy being only, then, with what is immortal, we shall partake
necessarily of that nature which attracts us; and the body no longer
clogging the intenseness of our desires, we shall be able by a wish to
transport ourselves wheresoever we please,--from star to star, from glory
to glory, charioted and winged by our wishes."
Godolphin did not reply, for he was struck with the growing paleness of
the mystic, and with a dreaming and intent fixedness that seemed creeping
over his eyes, which were usually bright and restless. The day was now
fast declining, Lucilla entered the room, and came caressingly to her
father's side.
"Is the evening warm, my child?" said the astrologer.
"Very mild and warm," answered Lucilla.
"Give me your arm then," said he; "I will sit a little while without the
threshold."
The Romans live in flats, as at Edinburgh, and with a common stair.
Volktman's abode was in the secondo piano. He descended the stairs with
a step lighter than it had been of late; and sinking into a seat without
the house, seemed silently and gratefully to inhale the soft and purple
air of an Italian sunset.
By and by the sun had entirely vanished: and that most brief but most
delicious twilight, common to the clime, had succeeded. Veil-like and
soft, the mist that floats at that hour between earth and heaven, lent its
transparent shadow to the scene around them: it seemed to tremble as for a
moment, and then was gone. The moon arose, and cast its light over
Volktman's earnest countenance,--over the rich bloom and watchful eye of
Lucilla,--over the contemplative brow and motionless figure of Godolphin.
It was a group of indefinable interest: the Earth was so still, that the
visionary might well have fancied it had hushed itself, to drink within
its quiet heart the voices of that Heaven in whose oracles he believed.
Not one of the group spoke,--the astrologer's mind and gaze were riveted
above; and neither of his companions wished to break the meditations of
the old and dreaming man.
Godolphin, with folded arms and downcast eyes, was pursuing his own
thoughts; and Lucilla, to whom Godolphin's presence was a subtle and
subduing intoxication, looked indeed upward to the soft and tender
heavens, but with the soul of the loving daughter of earth.
Slowly, nor marked by his companions, the gaze of the mystic deepened and
deepened in its fixedness.
The minutes went on; and the evening waned, till a chill breeze, floating
down from the Latian Hills, recalled Lucilla's attention to her father.
She covered him tenderly with her own mantle, and whispered gently in his
ear her admonition to shun the coldness of the coming night. He did not
answer; and on raising her voice a little higher, with the same result,
she looked appealingly to Godolphin. He laid his hand on Volktman's
shoulder; and, bending forward to address him,--was struck dumb by the
glazed and fixed expression of the mystic's eyes. The certainty flashed
across him; he hastily felt Volktman's pulse--it was still. There was no
doubt left on his mind; and yet the daughter, looking at him all the
while, did not even dream of this sudden and awful stroke. In silence,
and unconsciously, the strange and solitary spirit of the mystic had
passed from its home--in what exact instant of time, or by what last
contest of nature, was not known.
