no less than the external world, is full of
illusions. They arise from distorted vision, from a disorder of the
senses, or from an error of judgment upon data correctly derived from
their evidence. Under the influence of a predominant train of thought,
an absorbing emotion, a person ready charged with an uncontrolled
imagination will see, as Shakspeare has it--

"More devils than vast hell can hold."

Half, if not all, of the ghost stories, which are equally dangerous and
absorbing to youth, arise from illusion--there they have their
foundation; but believers in them obstinately refuse to believe anything
but that which their overcharged and predisposed imagination leads them
to. Some of us walk about this world of ours--as if it were not of
itself full enough of mystery--as ready to swallow any thing wonderful
or horrible, as the country clown whom a conjurer will get upon his
stage to play tricks with. Fooled by a redundant imagination, delighted
to be tricked by her potency, we dream away, flattered by the idea that
a supernatural messenger is sent to us, and to us alone. We all have our
family ghosts, in whom we more than half believe. Each one of us has a
mother or a wise aunt, or some female relation, who, at one period of
her life, had a dream, difficult to be interpreted, and foreboding good
or evil to a child of the house.

We are so grand, we men, "noble animals, great in our deaths and
splendid even in our ashes," that we can not yield to a common fate
without some overstrained and bombast conceit that the elements
themselves give warning. Casca, in "Julius Caesar," rehearses some few
of the prodigies which predicted Caesar's death:

"A common slave (you know him well by sight)
Held up his left hand, which did flame, and burn
Like twenty torches join'd; and yet his hand,
Not sensible of fire, remained unscorched....
And, yesterday, the bird of night did sit,
Even at noon-day, upon the market-place,
Hooting and shrieking. When these prodigies
Do so conjointly meet, let not men say,
'_These are their reasons--they are natural_;
For, I believe, they are portentous things."

A great many others besides our good Casca believe in these portents and
signs, and their dignity would be much hurt if they were persuaded that
the world would go on just the same if they and their family were
utterly extinct, and that no eclipse would happen to portend that
calamity. In Ir