What inference is to be drawn from this extraordinary tale? I confess I
cannot, and do not, believe that apparitions revisit the earth even at the
"glimpses o' the moon," nor does this story at all change my opinion, and
for one grand reason, which is this--That it is highly improbable that the
course of nature would be interrupted for the production of so
insignificant an effect, for it appears an unnecessary exertion of divine
power, when the good attained would be little or none.
Let us, therefore, attribute it to a powerful imagination acting on a mind
already affected with anxiety, and I believe we shall have no occasion for
yielding to the idea of an apparition to explain the circumstance. I am
acquainted with another tale of the same kind, but I am debarred from
relating it, from my not being authorized to do so by the person, a
gentleman of large property in Scotland, to whom it occurred. Lord Byron
was much addicted to that species of superstition of which I am treating:
the gloomy idea of spirits revisiting the earth to gaze on those who they
loved, was congenial to his mind, and an overheated fancy indulged beyond
its due limits, converted the morbid visionary into the superstitious
ascetic.
There is an account of a ghost related in the Notes to Moore's Life of the
Noble Poet (vol.
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