secure to him a moderate independence. His delight at thus terminating wanderings and labours now so unsuited to his years, his new and happy sensations of ease and security, his sincere and lively gratitude, are simply but strongly expressed; he settled himself at Durham near some of his friends and there he still resides, waiting his summons to that state where every outward distinc- WITCHES, AND OTHER NIGHT FEARS. no reason for disbelieving one attested story of this nature more than another on the score of absurdity. There is no law to judge of the lawless, or canon by which a dream may be criticised. I have sometimes thought that I could not have existed in days of received witchcraft; that I could not have slept in a village where one of those reputed hags dwelt. Our ancestors were bolder or more obtuse. Amidst the universal belief that these wretches were in league with the author of all evil, holding hell tributary to their muttering, no simple Justice of the Peace seems to have scrupled issuing, or silly Headborough serving, a warrant upon themas if they should subpoena Satan!Prospero in his boat, with his books and wand about him, suffers himself to be conveyed away at the mercy of his en WE E are too hasty when we set down our ancestors in the gross for fools, for the monstrous inconsistencies (as they seem to us) involved in their creed of witchcraft. In the relations of this visible world we find them to have been as rational, and shrewd to detect an historic anomaly as ourselves. But when once the invisible world was supposed to be opened, and the lawless agency of bad spirits assumed, what measures of probability, of decency, of fitness, or proportion of that which distinguishes the likely from the palpable absurd-could they have to guide them in the rejection or admission of any particular testimony?—That maidens pined away, wasting inwardly as their waxen images consumed before a fire-that corn was lodged, and cattle lamed-that whirlwinds uptore in diabolical revelry the oaks of the forest-emies to an unknown island. He might or that spits and kettles only danced a fearful-innocent vagary about some rustic's kitchen when no wind was stirring -were all equally probable where no law of agency was understood. That the prince of the powers of darkness, passing by the flower and pomp of the earth, should lay preposterous siege to the weak fantasy of indigent eld-has neither likelihood nor unlikelihood a priori to us, who have no measure to guess at his policy, or standard to estimate what rate those anile souls may fetch in the devil's market. Nor, when the wicked are expressly symbolized by a goat, was it to be wondered at so much, that he should come sometimes in that body, and assert his metaphor.⚫ That the intercourse was opened at all between both worlds was perhaps the mistake-but that once assumed, I see have raised a storm or two, we think on the passage. His acquiescence is in exact analogy to the non-resistance of witches to the constituted powers.What stops the Fiend in Spenser from tearing Guyon to pieces-or who had made it a condition of his prey, that Guyon must take assay of the glorious bait-we have no guess. We do not know the laws of that country. From my childhood I was extremely inquisitive about witches and witch stories. My maid, and more legendary aunt, supplied me with good store. But I shall mention the accident which directed my curiosity originally into this channel. In my father's book-closet, the History of the Bible, by Stackhouse, occupied a distinguished station. The pictures with which it abounds--one of the ark, in particular, and another of Solomon's temple, delineated with all the fidelity of occular admeasurement, as if the artist had been upon the spot -attracted my childish attention. There was a picture too, of the Witch raising up Samuel, which I wish that I had never seen. Stackhouse is in two huge tomes-and there was a pleasure in removing folios of that magnitude, which, with infinite straining, was as much as I could manage, from the situation which they occupied upon an upper shelf. Turning over the picture of the ark with too much haste, I unhappily made a breach in its ingenious fabric-driving my inconsiderate fingers right through the two larger quadrupeds the elephant, and the camelthat stare (as well they might) out of the two last windows next the steerage in that unique piece of naval architecture. Stackhouse was henceforth locked up, and became an interdicted treasBut there was one impression which I had imbibed from Stackhouse, which no lock or bar could shut out, and which was destined to try my childish nerves rather more seriously.-That detestable picture! ure. I was dreadfully alive to nervous terrors. The night-time solitude, and the dark, were my hell. The sufferings I endured in this nature would justify the expression. I never laid my head on my pillow, I suppose, from the fourth to the seventh year of my lifeso far as memory serves in things so long ago-without an assurance, which realized its own prophecy, by seeing some frightful spectre. Be old Stackhouse then acquitted in part, if I say that in his picture of the Witch raising up Samuel I owe-not my midnight terrors, the hell of my infancy-but the shape and manner of their visitation. It was he who dressed up for me a hag that nightly sate upon my pillow-a true bed-fellow when my aunt or my maid was far from me. All day long, while the book was permitted me, I dreamed waking over his delineation, and at night (if I may use so bold an expression) awoke into sleep, and found the vision true. The feeling about for a friendly arm-the hoping for a familiar voice, when children wake screaming —and find none to soothe them-what a terrible shaking it is to their poor nerves! The keeping them up till midnight, through candle-light and the unwholesome hours, as they are called, would, I am satisfied in a medical point of view, prove the better caution. -That detestable picture, as I have said, gave the fashion to my dreams— if dreams they were-for the scene of them was invariably the room in which I lay. Had I never met with the picture, the fears would have come self-pictured in some shape or other— Headless bear, black-man, or ape but, as it was, my imagination took that form.-It is not book, or picture, or the stories of foolish servants, which create these terrors in children. They can at most but give them a direction. Dear little T. H. who of all children has been brought up with the most scrupulous exclusion of every taint of superstition-who was never allowed to hear of a goblin or apparition, or scarcely to be told of bad men, or to read or to hear of any distressing story-finds all this world of fear, from which he has been so rigidly excluded ab extra, in his own "thick-coming fancies;" and from his little midnight pillow, this nurse-child of optimism will start at shapes, unborrowed of tradition, in sweats to which the reveries of the celldamned murderer are tranquillity. Gorgons, and Hydras and Chimaras dire-stories of Celano and the Harpies-may reproduce themselves in the brain of superstition—but they were there before. scripts, types, the archetypes are in us, They are tranand eternal. How else should the recital of that, which we know in a waking sense, to be false, come to affect us at all ? -or Names, whose sense we see not, Is it that we naturally conceive terror F ing, stifling, scorching demons-are Like one that on a lonesome road And having once turn'd round, walks on, That the kind of fear here treated of My night-fancies have long ceased to be afflictive. I confess an occasional night-mare; but I do not, as in early youth, keep a stud of them. Fiendish faces, with the extinguished taper, will come and look at me; but I know them for mockeries, even while I cannot elude their presence, and I fight and grapple with them. For the credit of my imagination, I am almost ashamed to say how tame and prosaic dreams are grown. They are never romantic, -seldom even rural. They are of architecture and of buildings-cities abroad, which I have never seen, and hardly have hope to see. I have traversed, for the seeming length of a natural day, Rome, Amsterdam, Paris, Lisbon their churches, palaces, squares, market-places, shops, suburbs, ruins, with an inexpressible sense of delight-a map-like distinctness of trace -and a day-light vividness of vision, that was all but being awake. I have travelled amongst the Westmoreland fells-my highest Alps,-but they were objects too mighty for the grasp of my dreaming recognition; and I have again and again awoke with ineffectual struggles of the "inner eye," to make out a shape in any way whatever, of Helvellyn. Methought I was in that country, but the mountains were gone. The poverty of my dreams mortify me. There is C—, at his will can conjure up icy domes, and pleasure-houses 5 for Kubla Khan and Abyssinian maids, and songs of Abara, and caverns, Where Alph, the sacred river, runs, to solace his night solitudes-when I The desire of the soul's creativeness in sleep might furnish no whimsical criterion of the quantum of poetical faculty resident in the same soul waking. An old gentleman, a friend of mine, and a humourist, used to carry this notion so far, that when he saw any stripling of his acquaintance ambitious of becoming a poet, his first question would be, "Young man, what sort of dreams have you?" I have so mucli faith in my old friend's theory, that when I feel that idle vein returning upon me, I presently subside into my proper clement of prose, remembering those eluding nereids, and that inauspi cious inland landing. * Mr. Coleridge's Ancient Mariner. ATHENEUM VOL. 11. LETTERS ON A TOUR IN SWITZERLAND. NO. 1. Even now where Alpine solitudes ascend, WE arrived at Orbe, from Dijon, by way of Salins and Pontarlier -a road full of beauty, and a worthy introduction to this lovely Pays de Vaud. A few leagues from Dijon, about Auxonne, as we drove along the plains, near the Saone, we first saw the bold blue outlines of the Jura; and at Salins we entered into one of its deep valleys, with all the picturesque accompaniments of fir forests and impending mountains. We had now fairly turned our backs on the tame me diocrity of French landscape, and though the post-book told us we were in the Departement du Jura, the forests, the mountains, the glens, the streams, the pastoral cottages, assured us we were on the verge of Switzerland. Nothing can be finer than the drive from Pontarlier to Orbe. Pontarlier is situated in a rich plain of pasture watered by the Doubs. The wooded barrier of the Jura rises majestically above the town, and the high road runs through a pass between perpendicular rocks so narrow as to have been formerly shut in by gates, the posts of which still remain. On the cliff on one side is perched the fortress of Joux beetling over the road. Here Toussaint L'Ouverture was confined by Napoleon, and died of cold, hunger, and grief. The rock is almost inaccessible, and admirably adapted for the site of a frontier fortress. Nothing but a refinement in oppressive cruelty could select the fortress for a state prison. A soft green valley, sunk deep between mountains rising abruptly and richly clothed with the deep green of the fir, now afforded us a passage through the chain of the Jura. At the village of Balaigne we passed the frontier. An inspection of our passports by one of the Gendarmerie Vaudoise, with a sabre by his side, and Liberte et Patrie, the motto of the Canton, glittering on his helmet, somewhat disturbed the romantic illusions of the scene, and the associations connected with a pastoral GOLDSMITH. republic. The drive by Balaigne and Montcharand to Orbe is one of the most lovely that can be conceived. Here it is that you first command a Swiss prospect, with all its luxuriant variety of mountain, forest, orchards, valleys, lakes, alps, and snows. The Lake of Geneva was obscured by the mists of the evening, but the lake of Neufchatel lay bright and glittering below us. Orbe, though not a pretty town in itself, is one of the most pleasing that I know. The character of the neighbouring scenery has a smiling loveliness, and a teeming fertility, which I never saw equalled. The neatness of the villages, the cleanly respectability of the people, their large well-built cottages and farms, the beautiful pastures, vineyards, orchards, that slope down to the romantic river Orbe, which alternately roars in cascades through rocks, and meanders through an expanse of meadow, the town with its steeples and old Roman towers on a vine-covered eminence above the river, the upland pastures of the Jura covered with flocks of cows and goats and studded with white chalets-add to this scene of beauty the black fir-clad ridge of the Jura above, the glittering lakes in the plains below, and the white broken majestic Alps glittering in the far horizon; and, perhaps, Nature can hardly supply a more enchanting scene of beauty and all-varied grace and luxuriance. Ă tone of retired peace and primitive repose reigns throughout the place. The old Swiss warrior of the 13th century, who stands on the fountain in the little market-place, looks as if he had lifted his stone sword without molestation for centuries. A fine beech-tree luxuriates on the walls of the gate of entrance, and the cascade formed by the Orbe, under the picturesque stone bridge, murmurs in harmony with the beauties of nature and the tranquil spirit of the place. We drove the other day to Val Orbe, three leagues from Orbe. No traveller who visits this part of Switzerland should neglect seeing this beautiful vil lage, and the singular and lovely source of the Orbe in its neighbourhood. In our way we visited a cascade formed by the river Orbe, near the village of Ballaigne. The exquisite limpidness of the water, the grandeur of the rocks fringed and tufted with luxuriant brushwood and beech-saplings, the seques tered shades which embosom the foaming torrent, render this one of the most interesting waterfalls I have seen. At Ballaigne, we left the carriage, and put ourselves under the guidance of a sturdy Swiss peasant to conduct us to the cascade. The man was dressed in a greasy plush jerkin, a large straw hat, loose trowsers, no stockings, and shoes not weather-tight. He appeared civil and intelligent; and a Swiss gentle man, who accompanied us, seemed to pay him some deference.. On returning from the cascade, and wishing him good morning, I begged him to take three francs for his trouble, which he declined with a civil and dignified bow. I soon learned my mistake, when our Swiss friend informed us that our Cicerone was no less a personage than a member of the Grand Council of the Canton de Vaud-a modern Cincinnatus, who mingles the labours of the field with the dignified functions of the senate. We had forgotten that we were now under a pastoral government. How far the crook and the forensic toga consort advantageously together, may perhaps be a question. The village of Val Orbe, with its neat and well-roofed cottages, its picturesque spire embosomed in poplars and orchards, stands by the Jura. The Orbe has its singular source a mile higher in the valley. Leaving the village, we followed the windings of the stream through the richest meadows, the valley gradually narrowing, the majestic fir-clad mountains on each side growing bolder and more perpendicular, and finally enclosing, with their gloomy wooded barrier, the lovely glen through which the stream flows and murmurs. Dark funereal pines and delicate larches shade the rocky precipices, and overhang the stream. The scene is wild, sequestered, and filled with a solitary and shady stillness. We began to wonder whence the stream could issue, till we at last found its source, and beheld it, with delight and astonishment, gliding forth in all its pellucid beauty, from a lofty wall of rock amidst the shade of these sylvan recesses. The stream is seventeen feet in width, and four or five in depth at its issuing from the rocks. It flows forth from the rock without a ripple, and at first glides and waves over the most green and graceful moss, till masses of rock, detached from the heights above, interrupt its course, and break its waters into murmuring eddies and cascades. It is impossible to conceive any thing more romantic than the whole scene; and no one that has visited it can wonder that poets should have peopled the fountains and streams of the woods with Naiads and Undines. Saussure prefers the source to that of Vaucluse, for beauty and interest. Its singularity is not less remarkable than its beauty. The water is furnished by the small Lakes of Joux and Rousses, which are situated above the rocks of Val Orbe at an elevation of 680 feet above the source. These lakes discharge themselves through tunnels between the vertical couches of rock, and penetrate through the mountain down to the source. * The drive from Orbe to Lausanne, by La Sarra and Cossonay, is a continued scene of fertility and graceful beauty. The haziness of a sultry atmosphere cleared up as we approached Lausanne, and opened to us the majestic chain of the rugged and purple Alps, with their white heads capped by the clouds, or glittering in the sun for a continuous length of above thirty leagues. Lausanne itself is one of the ugliest and most inconvenient towns on the Continent. The hills and slopes in the town render it almost impossible to drive in a carriage with safety. The cathedral is a venerable Gothic structure, in a fine situation, commanding the lake and the mountains. The town presents scarcely any objects of interest; but it is surprising how little they are missed. Nature in Switzerland is all in all. She has here built her perennial throne, and reigns unquestioned mistress of all our sympathies and sen |