“Turn
the weeding hook aside
And
spare the symbol dear.”
But the age has fairly outgrown them, and they are
falling away by a natural process of exfoliation.
The wonderland of childhood must henceforth be sought
within the domains of truth. The strange facts
of natural history, and the sweet mysteries of flowers
and forests, and hills and waters, will profitably
take the place of the fairy lore of the past, and
poetry and romance still hold their accustomed seats
in the circle of home, without bringing with them
the evil spirits of credulity and untruth. Truth
should be the first lesson of the child and the last
aspiration of manhood; for it has been well said that
the inquiry of truth, which is the lovemaking of it,
the knowledge of truth, which is the presence of it,
and the belief of truth, which is the enjoying of
it, is the sovereign good of human nature.
Fascination, saith Henry Cornelius Agrippa, in
the fiftieth chapter of his first book on Occult Philosophy,
“is a binding which comes of the spirit of the
witch through the eyes of him that is bewitched, entering
to his heart; for the eye being opened and intent upon
any one, with a strong imagination doth dart its beams,
which are the vehiculum of the spirit, into the eyes
of him that is opposite to her; which tender spirit
strikes his eyes, stirs up and wounds his heart, and
infects his spirit. Whence Apuleius saith, ’Thy
eyes, sliding down through my eyes into my inmost
heart, stirreth up a most vehement burning.’
And when eyes are reciprocally intent upon each other,
and when rays are joined to rays, and lights to lights,
then the spirit of the one is joined to that of the
other; so are strong ligations made and vehement loves
inflamed.” Taking this definition of witchcraft,
we sadly fear it is still practised to a very great
extent among us. The best we can say of it is,
that the business seems latterly to have fallen into
younger hands; its victims do not appear to regard
themselves as especial objects of compassion; and
neither church nor state seems inclined to interfere
with it.
As might be expected in a shrewd community like ours,
attempts are not unfrequently made to speculate in
the supernatural,—to “make gain of
sooth-saying.” In the autumn of last year
a “wise woman” dreamed, or somnambulized,
that a large sum of money, in gold and silver coin,
lay buried in the centre of the great swamp in Poplin,
New Hampshire; whereupon an immediate search was made
for the precious metal. Under the bleak sky
of November, in biting frost and sleet rain, some twenty
or more grown men, graduates of our common schools,
and liable, every mother’s son of them, to be
made deacons, squires, and general court members,
and such other drill officers as may be requisite in
the march of mind, might be seen delving in grim earnest,
breaking the frozen earth, uprooting swamp-maples
and hemlocks, and waking, with sledge and crowbar,
unwonted echoes in a solitude which had heretofore
only answered to the woodman’s axe or the scream
of the wild fowl. The snows of December put
an end to their labors; but the yawning excavation
still remains, a silent but somewhat expressive commentary
upon the age of progress.
