VIII. EXPECTATION. Esperaba, desperaba. Squirrel, mount yon oak so high, And its tallest donjon tower! To yon mountain, eagle old, And, oh thou that lov'st to mark Joyous lark, oh, mount to heaven! And now say, from topmost bough, And heaven's arch-oh, can ye see IX. PIRATE SONG. "Alerte! alerte! voici les pirates d'Ochali qui traversent le détroit!"-Le Captif d'Ochali. My pretty maid-hush, not a word! And just the thing to please the Dey; Away for flight she strives to break- We bore her in our arms away; By all her grief but lovelier made, Two diamond talismans her eyes, X. THE SACK OF THE CITY. "Fire, fire, blood and ruin."-CORTE REAL. Le Siege de Diu. Thy will, oh King, is done! Lightning but to consume, Slaughter his thousand giant arms hath tossed on high, While gathering overhead the vultures scream and wheel. Died the pale mothers!—and the virgins from their arms, Lo! where the city lies mantled in pall of death! Lo! where thy mighty arm hath passed, all things must bend! As the priests prayed the sword stopped their accursed breath, Vainly their sacred book for shield did they extend. Some infants yet survived, and the unsated steel Still drinks the life-blood of each whelp of Christian hound;— To kiss thy sandal's foot, oh King! thy people kneel, With golden circlet to thy glorious ankle bound. NEW ENGLAND SUPERNATURALISM. BY J. G. WHITTIER. IV. "Tamar.-But are they round us, Hadad? Not confined In penal chains and darkness? Hadad. So he said, And so your sacred books infer. What saith In conversing with a friend recently, Old women in this region yet tell marvellous stories of Gen. M., of Hampton, N. H., of his league with the Devil, who used to visit him occasionally in the shape of a small man in a leathern dress. The General's house was once burned, in revenge, as it is said, by the Fiend, whom the other had outwitted. He had agreed, it seems, to furnish the General with a boot-full of gold and silver poured annually down the chimney. The shrewd Yankee cut off, on one occasion, the foot of the boot, and the Devil kept pouring down the coin from the chimney's top, in a vain attempt to fill it, until the room was literally packed with the precious metal. When the General died, he was laid out, and put in a coffin as usual, but on the day of the funeral, on opening the lid, his body was not to be seen, and the neighbors came to the charitable conclusion that the Enemy had got his own at last. Haunted houses are getting scarce in New England. Formerly every village could boast of one or more of these favored tenements. I have nevertheless, seen several of a most unchristian reputation in this respect,old, black, and unseemly, with shingles and clap-boards hanging loose, and ragged, like the cloak of Otway's witch. A new coat of paint, in almost all cases, proves an effectual exorcism. A former neighbor of mine,—a simple, honest mechanic,-used to amuse us by his reiterated complaints of the diabolical revels of certain evil spirits, which had chosen his garret for their ballroom. All night long he could hear a dance going on above him, regulated by some infernal melody. He had no doubt whatever of the supernatural character of the annoyance, and treated with contempt the suggestion of his neighbors, that, after all it might be nothing more than the rats among his corn. Whoever has seen Great Pond in the East parish of Haverhill, has seen one of the very loveliest of the thousand little lakes or ponds of New England. With its soft slopes of greenest verdure its white and sparkling sand-rimits southern hem of pine and maple, mirrored, with spray and leaf, in the glassy water-its graceful hill-sentinels round about, white with the orchard-bloom of spring, or tasselled with the corn of autumn-its long sweep of blue waters, broken here and there by picturesque islands-it would seem a spot, of all others, where spirits of evil would shrink, rebuked and abashed, from the presence of the Beautiful. Yet here, too, has the shadow of the supernatural fallen. A lady of my acquaintance, a staid, unimaginative church-member, states that a few years ago she was standing in the angle formed by two roads, one of which traverses the pond shore, the other leading over the hill which rises abruptly from the water. It was a warm summer evening, just at sunset. She was startled by the appearance of a horse and cart of the kind used a century ago in New England, driving rapidly down the steep hill-side, and crossing the wall a few yards before her, without noise, or the displacing of a stone. The driver sat sternly erect -with a fierce countenance; grasping the reins tightly, and looking neither to the right nor the left. Behind the cart, and apparently lashed to it, was a woman of gigantic size, her countenance convulsed with a blended expression of rage and agony, writhing and struggling, like Laocoön in the folds of the serpent. Her head, neck, feet and arms were naked; wild locks of grey hair streamed back from temples corrugated and darkened. The horrible cavalcade swept by across the street, and disappeared at the margin of the pond. I have heard many similar stories, but the foregoing may serve as a sample of all. When we consider what the popular belief of New England was no longer than a century and a half ago, it is by no means surprising that something of the old superstition still lingers among us. Our puritan ancestors were, in their own view of the matter, a sort of advance guard and forlorn hope of Christendom, in its contest with the Bad Angel. The new world into which they had so valiantly pushed the outposts of the Church militant, was to them, not God's world, but the Devil's. They stood there on their little patch of sanctified territory, like the game-keeper of Der Frieschutz in the charmed circle, within were prayer, and fasting, unmelodious psalmody, and solemn hewing of heretics "before the Lord in Gilgal;" without were dogs and sorcerers," red children of perdition, Powah wizzards and "the foul fiend." In their grand old wilderness, broken by fair broad rivers, and dotted with loveliest lakes, hanging with festoons of leaf and vine and flower, the steep sides of mountains, whose naked tops rose over the surrounding verdure like altars of a giant world with its early summer green ness, and the many-colored verdure of its autumn, all glowing as if the rainbows of a summer shower had fallen upon it, under the clear, rich light of a sun, to which the misty day of their cold island was as moonlight,-they saw no beauty, they recognized no holy revelation. It was to them terrible as the forest which Dante traversed, on his way to the World of Pain. Every advance step they made was upon the Enemy's territory. And one has only to read the writings of the two Mathers, to perceive that that Enemy was to them no metaphysical abstraction, no scholastic definition, no figment of a poetical fancy, but a living, active Reality, alternating between the sublimest possibilities of evil, and the lowest tricks of mean mischief; now a "tricksey spirit," disturbing the good wife's platters or soiling her new-washed linen, and anon riding the storm-cloud, and pointing its thunder-bolts; for as the elder Mather pertinently inquires," how else is it that our meeting-houses are burned by the lightning ?" What was it, for instance, but his subtlety, which, speaking through the lips of Madam Hutchinson, confuted the "Judges of Israel," and put to their wit's end the godly ministers of the puritan Zion? Was not his evil finger manifested in the contumacious heresy of Roger Williams ? Who else gave the Jesuit missionaries-locusts from the pit as they were-such a hold on the affections of those very savages who would not have scrupled to hang the scalp of pious father Wilson himself from their girdles? To the vigilant eye of Puritanism was he not alike discernible in the light wantonness of the May-pole revellers, beating time with clever foot to the vain music of obscene dances; and in the silent, hat-canopied gatherings of the Quakers, "the most melancholy of the sects," as Dr. More calls them? Perilous and glorious was it under these circumstances, for such men as Mather and Stoughton to gird up their stout loins, and do battle with the unmeasured, all-surrounding Terror. Let no man lightly estimate their spiritual knight-errantry. The heroes of old romance who went about smiting dragons, lopping giants' heads, and otherwise pleasantly diverting themselves, scarcely deserve mention in comparison with our New England champions, who, trusting not to carnal sword and lance, in a contest with principalities and powers "Spirits that live throughout, Vital in every part, not as frail man," encountered their enemies with weapons forged by the stern spiritual armorer of Geneva. The life of Cotton Mather is as full of romance as the legends of Ariosto, or the tales of Beltenebros, and Florisando in Amadis de Gaul. All about him was enchanted ground-devils glared on him in his "closet wrestlings,"-portents blazed in the heavens above him,-while he, commissioned, appointed, and set apart as the watcher and warder, and spiritual champion of "the chosen people," stood ever ready for battle, with open eye and quick ear for the detection of the subtle approaches of the enemy. No wonder is it that the spirits of evil combined against him-that they beset him as they did of old St. Anthony-that they shut up the bowels of the General Court against his long-cherished hope of the Presidency of old Harvard-that they even had the audacity to lay hands on his anti-diabolical manuscripts, or that "ye divil that was in ye girl flewe at and tore" his grand sermon against witches. How edifying is his account of the young bewitched maiden, whom he kept in his house for the purpose of making experiments which should satisfy all "obstinate Sadducees." How satisfactory to orthodoxy, and confounding to heresy is the nice discrimination of "ye divil in ye girl," who was choked in attempting to read the Catechism, yet found no trouble with a pestilent Quaker pamphlet,-who was quiet and good-humored when the worthy Doctor was idle, but went into paroxysms of rage when he sat down to indite his diatribes against witches and familiar spirits. All this is pleasant enough now; we can laugh at the Doctor and his demons: but little matter of laughter was it to the victims on Salem hill-to the prisoners in the jails-to poor Giles Corey, tortured with planks upon his breast, which forced the tongue from his mouth, and his life from his old palsied body to bereaved and quaking families to a whole community priest-ridden and spectre-smitten-gasping in the sick dream of a spiritual nightmare, and given over to believe a lie. We may laugh, for the grotesque is blended with the horrible, but we must also pity and shudder. God be thanked that the delusion has measurably vanished; and they who confronted that delusion in its own age,-disenchanting with strong, clear sense, and sharp ridicule, their spell-bound generation,-the German Wierus, the Italian D'Apone, the English Scot and the New England Calef,-deserve high honors as the benefactors of their race. They were indeed branded through life as infidels and "damnable Sadducees," by a corrupt priesthood, who ministered to a credulity which could be so well turned to their advantage, but the truth which they uttered lived after them, and wrought out its appointed work, for it had a divine commission and Godspeed. Runs With "The oracles are dumb, No voice or hideous hum through the arched roof in words deceiving; Apollo from his shrine Can now no more divine, Dimmer and dimmer, as the generations pass away, this tremendous Terror-this all-pervading espionage of Evil-this well-nigh infinite Haunter and Tempter-this active incarnation of motiveless malignity, presents itself to the imagination. The once imposing and solemn rite of exorcism has become obsolete in the Church. Men are no longer in any quarter of the world racked, or pressed under planks, to extort a confession of diabolical alliance. The heretic now laughs to scorn the solemn farce of the Church, which in the name of the All-Merciful formally delivers him over to Satan. Oh, for the sake of abused and longcheated humanity, let us rejoice that it is so, when we consider how for long, weary centuries the millions of professed Christendom stooped, awe-stricken, under the yoke of spiritual and temporal despotism, grinding on from generation to generation in a despair which had passed complaining, because Superstition, in alliance with Tyranny, had filled their upward pathway to Freedom with Shapes of Terror-the spectres of God's wrath to the uttermost-the Fiend and his torment, the smoke of which rises forever. Through |