The travellers were returning to Vienna from Pesth; a damp day set in while they were on the journey; again intermittent fever attacked the sensitive invalid, and suddenly, mysteriously, his life was ended.  It was the 15th of September, 1833, and Arthur Hallam lay dead in his father’s arms.  Twenty-two brief years, and all high hopes for him, the manly, the noble-spirited, this side the tomb, are broken down forever.  Well might his heart-crushed father sob aloud, “He seemed to tread the earth as a spirit from some better world.”  The author of “Horae Subsecivae” aptly quotes Shakspeare’s memorable words, in connection with the tragic bereavement of that autumnal day in Vienna:—­

     “The idea of thy life shall sweetly creep
     Into my study of imagination;
     And every lovely organ of thy life
     Shall come apparelled in more precious habit,
     More moving delicate, and full of life,
     Into the eye and prospect of my soul,
     Than when thou liv’dst indeed.”

Standing by the grave of this young person, now made so renowned by the genius of a great poet, whose song has embalmed his name and called the world’s attention to his death, the inevitable reflection is not of sorrow.  He sleeps well who is thus lamented, and “nothing can touch him further.”

THE CONFESSIONS OF A MEDIUM.

It is not yet a year since I ceased to act as a Spiritual Medium. (I am forced to make use of this title as the most intelligible, but I do it with a strong mental protest.) At first, I desired only to withdraw myself quietly from the peculiar associations into which I had been thrown by the exercise of my faculty, and be content with the simple fact of my escape.  A man who joins the Dashaways does not care to have the circumstance announced in the newspapers.  “So, he was an habitual drunkard,” the public would say.  I was overcome by a similar reluctance,—­nay, I might honestly call it shame,—­since, although I had at intervals officiated as a Medium for a period of seven years, my name had been mentioned, incidentally, only once or twice in the papers devoted especially to Spiritualism.  I had no such reputation as that of Hume or Andrew Jackson Davis, which would call for a public statement of my recantation.  The result would be, therefore, to give prominence to a weakness, which, however manfully overcome, might be remembered to my future prejudice.

I find, however, that the resolution to be silent leaves me restless and unsatisfied.  And in reflecting calmly—­objectively, for the first time—­upon the experience of those seven years, I recognize so many points wherein my case is undoubtedly analogous to that of hundreds of others who may be still entangled in the same labyrinth whence I have but recently escaped, so clear a solution of much that is enigmatical, even to those who reject Spiritualism, that the impulse to write weighs upon me with the pressure of a neglected