Which, like films torn from bodies' outmost face
Hither and thither flutter through the air;
These scare us, meeting us in waking hours,
And in our dreams, when oftentimes we see
Marvellous shapes, and phantoms of the dead
Which oft have roused us horror-struck from sleep;
Lest we should judge perchance that souls escape
From Acheron, shades flit 'mid living men,
Or aught of us can after death endure."[1]
Never, perhaps, has the train of thought which the Epicurean poet so ingeniously combats been more clearly drawn out than in Madge Wildfire's rambling talk of her dead baby, "Whiles I think my puir bairn's dead—ye ken very weel it's buried—but that signifies naething. I have had it on my knee a hundred times, and a hundred till that, since it was buried—and how could that be were it dead, ye ken—it's merely impossible."
It appears then, from these considerations, that when we find dim notions of a future state current in the remotest regions of the world, we must not thence assume that they were all diffused from a single geographical centre. The case is one in which any one plausible explanation from natural causes is sufficient to bar the argument from historical connexion. On the other hand, there is nothing to hinder such an argument in the following case, which is taken as showing the opposite side of the problem.
The great class of stories known as Beast Fables have of late risen much in public estimation. In old times they were listened to by high and low with the keenest enjoyment for their own sake. Then they were wrested from their proper nature into means of teaching little moral lessons, and at last it came to be the most contemptuous thing that could be said of a silly,
- ↑ Lucret. 'De Rerum Natura,' iv. 29–39:—
"Nunc agere incipiam tibi, quod vementer ad has res
Attinet, esse ea quæ rerum simulacra vocamus;
Quæ, quasi membranæ summo de corpore rerum
Dereptæ, volitant ultroque citroque per auras,
Atque eadem nobis vigilantibus obvia mentes
Terrificant atque in somnis, cum sæpe figuras
Contuimur miras simulacraque luce carentum,
Quæ nos horrifice languentis sæpe sopore
Excierunt; ne forte animas Acherunte reamur
Effugere aut umbras inter vivos volitare,
Neve aliquid nostri post mortem posse relinqui."
