The Night-Side of Nature; Or, Ghosts and Ghost-Seers. Catherine Crowe

been to M⁠—— for this purpose, and had obtained his last supply, for he was now recovered, and about to discontinue the medicine, a voice seemed to warn him that some great danger was impending, his life was in jeopardy; then he heard, but not with his outward ear, a beautiful prayer. “It was not myself that prayed,” he said, “the prayer was far beyond anything I am capable of composing—it spoke of me in the third person, always as he; and supplicated that for the sake of my widowed mother this calamity might be averted. My father had been dead some months. I was sensible of all this, yet I can not say whether I was asleep or awake. When I rose in the morning, the whole was present to my mind, although I had slept soundly in the interval; I felt, however, as if there was some mitigation of the calamity, though what the danger was with which I was threatened, I had no notion. When I was dressed, I prepared to take my medicine, but on lifting the bottle, I fancied that the color was not the same as usual. I looked again, and hesitated, and finally, instead of taking two tablespoonfuls, which was my accustomed dose, I took but one. Fortunate it was that I did so; the apothecary had made a mistake; the drug was poison; I was seized with a violent vomiting, and other alarming symptoms, from which I was with difficulty recovered. Had I taken the two spoonfuls, I should, probably, not have survived to tell the tale.”

      The manner in which I happened to obtain these particulars is not uninteresting. I was spending the evening with Mr. Wordsworth, at Ridal, when he mentioned to me that a stranger, who had called on him that morning, had quoted two lines from his poem of “Laodamia,” which, he said, to him had a peculiar interest. They were these:—