e of thine,
So is thy image on this heart of mine.'
But woe is me! such presents luckless prove,
For knives, they tell me, always sever love."

In the story of _Isabella_, by Boccaccio, there are touching incidents
of the apparition of a deceased lover appearing to his mistress. The
tale is thus rendered by Keats:

"It was a vision. In the drowsy gloom,
The dull of midnight, at her couch's foot
Lorenzo stood and wept: the forest tomb
Had marr'd his glossy hair, which once could shoot
Lustre into the sun, and put cold doom
Upon his lips, and taken the soft lute
From his lorn voice, and passt his loomed ears
Had made a miry channel for his tears.

Strange sound it was, when the pale shadow spoke;
For there was striving in its piteous tongue,
To speak as when on earth it was awake,
And Isabella on its music hung:
Languor there was in it, and tremulous shake,
As in a palsied Druid's harp unstrung;
And through it moaned a ghostly under-song,
Like hoarse night gusts sepulchral biers among.

Its eyes, though wild, were still all dewy bright
With love, and kept all phantom fear aloof
From the poor girl by magic of their bright,
The while it did unthread the horrid woof
Of the late darkened time--the murd'rous spite
Of pride and avarice--the dark pine roof
In the forest--and the sodden turfed dell,
When, without any word, from stabs it fell.

Saying moreover, 'Isabel, my sweet!
Red whortle-berries droop above my head,
And a large flint-stone weighs upon my feet,
Around me beeches and high chesnuts shed
Their leaves and prickly nuts; a sheep-fold bleat
Comes from beyond the river to my bed:
Go shed one tear upon my heather-bloom,
And it shall comfort me within the tomb.

'I am a shadow now, alas! alas!
Upon the skirts of human nature dwelling
Alone: I chaunt alone the holy mass,
While little sounds of life around me knelling,
And glossy bees at noon do fieldward pass,
And many a chapel bell the hour is telling,
Paining me through: these sounds grow strange to me,
And thou art distant in humanity.'"

Let us now see what Burns, the never-to-be-forgotten Scottish poet,
says in his _Address to the Deil_ and _Tam o' Shanter_. In his own
felicitous way he brings out the belief the ancient inhabitants had of
visible de