I
remember once Doctor Holmes's talking of the physician as the true seer,
whose awful gift it was to behold with the fatal second sight of science
the shroud gathering to the throat of many a doomed man apparently in
perfect health, and happy in the promise of unnumbered days. The thought
may have been suggested by some of the toys of superstition which
intellectual people like to play with.
I never could be quite sure at first that Longfellow's brother-in-law,
Appleton, was seriously a spiritualist, even when he disputed the most
strenuously with the unbelieving Autocrat. But he really was in earnest
about it, though he relished a joke at the expense of his doctrine, like
some clerics when they are in the safe company of other clerics. He told
me once of having recounted to Agassiz the facts of a very remarkable
seance, where the souls of the departed outdid themselves in the
athletics and acrobatics they seem so fond of over there, throwing large
stones across the room, moving pianos, and lifting dinner-tables and
setting them a-twirl under the chandelier. "And now," he demanded, "what
do you say to that?" "Well, Mr. Appleton," Agassiz answered, to
Appleton's infinite delight, "I say that it did not happen."
One night they began to speak at the Dante supper of the unhappy man
whose crime is a red stain in the Cambridge annals, and one and another
recalled their impressions of Professor Webster.
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