Ere it is risen, sometimes paints its image
In the atmosphere, so often do the spirits
Of great events stride on before the events,
And in To-day already walks To-morrow.”This it is not difficult to accept. It seems fitting that presages should herald the
death of kings and the revolutions of nations; but the mind cannot convince itself
that the spirits of the dead will cross the shadowy borders to foretell the trivial
accidents that chequer ordinary lives. Yet, as Johnson says: “A man on a journey
far from home falls from a horse; another who is perhaps at work about the
house, sees him bleeding on the ground, commonly with a landscape of the place
where the accident befalls him. Another seer, driving home his cattle, or
wandering in idleness, or musing in the sunshine, is suddenly surprised by the
appearance of a bridal ceremony or funeral procession, and counts the mourners
or attendants, of whom, if he knows them, he relates the names, if he knows
them not he can describe the dresses.”
Woodrow tells of “a popish lady,” living near Boroughbridge, who dreamed that
she saw a coach, and a lady in it, almost lost in the river. She directed her
servants to watch during two nights, to guard against an accident, but nothing
happened. “On the third night, pretty late, the Lady Shawfield came, and of a
sudden the coach was overturned, and filled with water. The coachman got upon
one of the horses, to save his life. The good and religious Lady Shawfield was
for some time under water: and upon the cry rising, the popish lady’s servants
came to their assistance. With much difficulty, the coach and lady in it were got
out of the water.” And the Lady Shawfield, being laid upon the bank, gradually
recovered her senses.
In the early months of the Commonwealth, while Mackenzie of Tarbat,
afterwards Earl of Cromarty, was riding in a field among his tenants, who were
manuring barley, a stranger “called that way on his foot, and stopped likewise,
and said to the countrymen, ‘You need not be so busy about that barley, for I see
the Englishmen’s horses tethered among it; and other parts mowed down for
them.’ Tarbet asked him how he knew them to be Englishmen, and if he had
ever seen any of them? He said, ‘No; but he saw them strangers, and heard the
English were in Scotland, and guessed it could be no other than they.’ In the
month of July, the thing happened directly as the man said he saw it.”
The influence exercised on the imagination by events in which we are deeply
interested, and the manner in which our hopes or fears are mistaken for