suggesting the vague "suppose?" _that_, I should think, must visit
every mind; but rather like a consciousness, a conviction,
amounting almost to certainty, only short of seeing and hearing.
How well I remember in that cedar hall at Oatlands, the sort of
invisible presence I used to feel pervading the place. It was a
large circle of huge cedar trees in a remote part of the grounds;
the paths that led to it were wild and tangled; the fairest flower,
the foxglove, grew in tall clumps among the foliage of the thickets
and shrubberies that divided the lawn into undulating glades of
turf all round it; a sheet of water in which there was a rapid
current--I am not sure that it was not the river--ran close by, and
the whole place used to affect my imagination in the weirdest way,
as the habitation of invisible presences of some strange
supernatural order. As the evening came on, I used frequently to go
there by myself, leaving our gentlemen at table, and my mother and
Lady Francis in the drawing-room. How I flew along by the syringa
bushes, brushing their white fragrant blossoms down in showers as I
ran, till I came to that dark cedar hall, with its circle of giant
trees, whose wide-sweeping branches spread, at it were, a halo of
darkness all round it! Through the space at the top, like the open
dome of some great circular temple, such as the Pantheon of Rome,
the violet-colored sky and its starry worlds looked down. Sometimes
the pure radiant moon and one fair attendant star would seem to
pause above me in the dark framework of the great tree-tops. That
place seemed peopled with spirits to me; and while I was there I
had the intensest delight in the sort of all but conscious
certainty that it was so. Curiously enough, I never remember
feeling the slightest nervousness while I was there, but rather an
immense excitement in the idea of such invisible companionship; but
as soon as I had emerged from the magic circle of the huge black
cedar trees, all my fair visions vanished, and, as though under a
spell, I felt perfectly possessed with terror, and rushed home
again like the wind, fancying I heard following footsteps all the
way I went. The moon seemed to swing to and fro in the sky, and
every twisted tree and fantastic shadow that lay in my path made me