geometrical diagrams, how
frightfully narrow--how spectral did its slender lines appear at a
distance, to any philosophic spectators that knew the amount of human
interests confided to that army, and the hopes for Christendom that even
then were trembling in the balance! Such a disproportion, it seems,
might exist, in the case of a ghostly war between the harvest of
possible results and the slender band of reapers that were to gather it
in. And there was even a worse peril than any analogous one that has
been _proved_ to exist at Waterloo. A British surgeon, indeed, in a work
of two octavo volumes, has endeavored to show that a conspiracy was
traced at Waterloo, between two or three foreign regiments, for kindling
a panic in the heat of the battle, by flight, and by a sustained
blowing-up of tumbrils, with the miserable purpose of shaking the
British firmness. But the evidences are not clear; whereas my brother
insisted that the presence of sham men, distributed extensively among
the human race, and meditating treason against us all, had been
demonstrated to the satisfaction of all true philosophers. Who were
these shams and make-believe men? They were, in fact, people that had
been dead for centuries, but that, for reasons best known to themselves,
had returned to this upper earth, walked about among us, and were
undistinguishable, except by the most learned of necromancers, from
authentic men of flesh and blood. I mention this for the sake of
illustrating the fact, that the same crazes are everlastingly revolving
upon men. Two years ago, during the carnival of universal anarchy
equally among doers and thinkers, a closely-printed pamphlet was
published with this title: "A New Revelation, or the Communion of the
Incarnate Dead with the Unconscious Living. Important Fact, without
trifling Fiction, by HIM." I have not the pleasure of knowing HIM; but
certainly I must concede to HIM, that he writes like a man of education,
and also like a man of extreme sobriety, upon his extravagant theme. He
is angry with Swedenborg, as might be expected, for his "absurdities;"
but, as to _him_, there is no chance that he should commit any
absurdity, because (p. 6) "he has met with some who have acknowledged
the fact of their having come from the dead"--_habes confitentem reum_.
Few, however, are endowed with so much candor; and, in particular, for
the honor of literature, it grieves me to find, by p. 10, that the
largest number of these