days afterwards arrived news of the shipwreck.'

Now the baser part of man's nature may attach itself to a great variety of low and transitory objects, but one thing it is sure to prize highly, and that is the body and all that immediately concerns it: after the Fetch has long ceased to care for family or lands, it retains vital force enough to cling as desperately as ever to the loathsome corpse in which is gathered all that now remains to it of life: and those who have chased away the restless spectre which haunted their paths, or made their homes horrible, may find that their tormentor still lives if they track him to his last visiting-place, the grave. From the wealth of anecdotes on this head which abound in all Northern literature we select two, which are interesting from their strange mutual agreement and contradiction.

'Gudrun was very religious: she was the first woman in Iceland who learned the psalter; and she would often be at her prayers in church by night, and her granddaughter Hardis along with her. Now it is said that one night Hardis dreamed that a woman came to her wrapped in a mantle, and of an ill countenance, who said, "Tell thy grandmother I am ill-pleased with her; for she lies grovelling upon me all night long, and lets such hot drops fall upon me that I am all in a blaze.' Next morning Gudrun had the pavement of the church floor where she had been used to kneel taken up, and deep in the earth they found black ugly bones, and a place made ready for the working of spells so they were sure this was the tomb of a wise woman;

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and the bones were removed to a place where never man came.'

The second shows the behaviour of a good ghost under similar circumstances; in the shape in which it has come down to us it is of later origin, and seems to have been tampered with by the monk who tells it. As will be seen, the ghost, in this instance, is not the Fetch but the soul for the old belief in the double nature of the body's tenant was fading away.

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There was a man named Haldor, who was a good Christian: now it seemed to him, one spring night, that a man of bright and glorious appearance stood beside him, and spake thus to him: "I have something to say unto thee, Haldor: it sore misliketh me that thy handmaid, as she cometh in from the milking, is wont ever to dry her feet over my grave: moreover, it is known to me that thou art about to build a church here in the homestead; now it is my wish that this church do stand over my bones." Then in his sleep Haldor asked who this man might be. He answered, "My name is Asolf: I came to this country when it was first taken possession of, and I was a good Christian, as thou wilt have heard. Almighty God has permitted me to tell thee of my burialplace." When Haldor awoke he straitly charged his handmaiden to dry her feet elsewhere.'

As the belief in the reality of spectres faded away, the Fetch tended more and more to become a modern ghost, until at last the soul of Gudrun, the terrible heroine of the Volsunga saga, actually returns from the spirit world to caution one of her descendants.

The person thus favoured expressed great surprise and said, 'Are heathen spirits thus permitted to roam at large through a Christian land? 'Ask me not what I am,' rejoined the mighty ghost; whether I be a heathen or whether I be a Christian, I will ever be true to them I love.' We shall appreciate more thoroughly the vast difference which has grown up between the genuine old ghost and the shadowy phantom to which he has now dwindled down, if we consider the means which were commonly adopted to get rid of each of them when the supernatural presence became insufferable. The average ghost of later times is a wicked soul that has escaped from its place of punishment, and has come back to trouble the living with merely spiritual terror: and he is encountered with the weapons of the exorcist, who raises about him a devotional and uncongenial atmosphere from which the evil being is glad to retreat even to his penal fires. A very different line of conduct was adopted towards the ghost of old. He was of the earth earthy, and so strictly local a personage, that it was as much the recognised duty of the landlord to see that a tenement was free from ghosts as that it was wind and water-tight. There is a ghost about the premises,' said a farmer to his landlord, one morning in the year of grace 1010; he has killed a good many of my cattle, and one or two men; and folks think he will be the ruin of the whole country side: if I cannot get something done for me, I must throw up the farm.' When the landlord heard this, says the old sagaman, he did not see his way out of the difficulty. If he was unequal to the task, the obligation devolved upon the lord of the manor, as the lawful authority who was responsible for the orderly state of the country. The way in which he proceeded to abate the nuisance

varied with the habits and temper of the intruder. In the case of a tolerably reasonable ghost, the representative of public order would expostulate, pointing out the illegality of his conduct in coming out of his grave every night with a crew of dead men, and establishing himself before the fire in a house in which he had only a life interest which had now determined: and the ghost has been known to rejoin 'Well, we will go. I thought all along we had no business here: an amount of law-abidingness which was not invariably displayed by the living Northman. But if, as usually happened, arguments were thrown away, somebody was obliged to undertake the more dangerous business of putting him out bodily, like any other trespasser: and old sea rovers were fond of boasting to their juniors of the spectres which in their young days they had brought to book. But if after such a forcible ejection he would not be quiet in his grave, but prowled round the homestead, threw the shepherd over a cliff on a frosty evening, or on winter nights made such ghastly sounds outside the house as drove men mad, the family would at last make up their minds to lay him at once and for ever. Now, he could exist so long only as those objects were still in being in which he took delight: if these, therefore, came to an end, he perished with them. Thus nobler ghosts live on while their family flourishes, and bewail its impend ing ruin as their own extinction. If the departed have been violently attached to some piece of property, let the treasure be destroyed and the spectre will be seen no more. If the dead man has been a base and degraded being, let his body be dug up and burnt to ashes, and the ghost shall never trouble anyone again. But some spectres there are which never can be effectually laid. If a man has been deeply

skilled in forbidden arts, which he has exercised only to the injury of his fellow-creatures-if he can chaunt a song which drives his enemy to sleeplessness, to madness, or to death, or if his evil eye can burn up the grass-the ghost of such an one will not perish with the body; for what the living man most loved is mischief; and although his corpse may be burnt or buried in a pathless moor, or deep below the sea, 'some wicked spirit still pervades the spot,' and makes the neighbourhood terrible for ever.

When now we compare the nature and the ways of the grim Scandinavian spectre with those of the ethereal creature to which it has been gradually refined away, we see at once that the latter retains many features which are inconsistent with its own character, but which were in excellent keeping with that of its predecessor. Thus the ancient ghost delighted in skulls, winding-sheets, and charnelhouses, haunted the scenes of former joys and crimes, could not cross a running stream, and so loved darkness that it swooned at the light of

a torch.

All this was very reasonable; for it had no new home in another world, was merely a fresh combination of earthly material, and derived much of its power from an unholy alliance with monsters who dwelt in caves, shunning the light. of the sun, lest they should be turned into stone: a calamity which befell many a loitering elf. But matters do not stand thus with the modern ghost the bodiless spirit which hankers after the foul prison from which it has been set free, which appears to be still subject to the laws of matter, or which condescends to restrict its visits to

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The silent, solemn hour

When night and morning meet,

is plainly acting on no principle at all, but is only observing old forms from which life is departed, and is as unreal a being as the man in armour at the lord mayor's show; all his trappings had a formidable meaning once, but no one fears the obsolete creature now; and only antiquaries can guess the object of the stage-properties in which he is arrayed.

F. J. S. EDGCOMBE.

L

ET us take a deep breath of— the sea! Love loses herself in this divine radiance; the light that never was on sea or shore must be something unspeakable if it can outshine this heavenly mingling of light and shadow, this liquid silver and gold and amber which reflects, as in the shield of the hero, the story of the overhanging heaven. The shining sea-plain lies at our feet, we look down upon it from the summit of granite crags against which for thousands of years the North Sea has warred in vain. Not quite in vain, since the waves have worn the strong rock through and through-so that here a rare Gothic arch, there a fretted Norman window, here a long range of Saracenic shafts, there a vaulted corridor simple as a Greek temple, rewards the toil of the wanderer who explores the silent solitudes of the cliffs. In the presence of these three mighty forces-the sea, the sky, and the rock-a man cannot but feel that there is something within hin which acknowledges a kinship with the Eternal. The sea and the sky together are always grand; but the deadly precipice, along which you scramble like a goat, introduces another element which adds to the sublimity not only of the scene, but of the spirit in which man regards the scene. One false step among these loose stones, upon that slippery carpet of sun-baked sea-grass, and you will make acquaintance with a mysterious world, mysterious, and yet lying close to us, and already explored by many who were our familiar companions in this common-place English life--you will make acquaintance, I say, with that mysterious world which lies outside the stone and lime and water and air which our eyes can behold, which our

hands can touch, which our bodily senses can appreciate. How will the spirit, the immortal part, disengage itself from the tenement of clay which is being thus roughly disruptured? Will sea and sky and all the gay pageantry of the visible world be at once obscured? or will one last glance be accorded to the departing soul as it wings its way through ether? Howeve these things may be (and one day we shall know-then it may be faintly recalling the poor guesses which we had made), it cannot be doubted that a grander association than this of rock, and sea, and sky is seldom met with. The mute silence of the heaven! The pa thetic solitudes of the gigantic for lorn cliff's! The solemn dirge of the sea, the sea which is the type at once of that infinite repose and infinite energy which we call-God.

The flecting years glide away noiselessly. It is twenty years since I last bade farewell to the rocky landscape which framed my earliest mental reminiscences. I return once more, and find the people gone. My dearest friendthe true, brave, simple, kindly, generous soul-who never thought of himself, save perhaps when some old stone or rusty piece of iron was dug up out of peat-moss, or worldold grave, and which he would clasp with all the cagerness of a lover, sleeps quietly in the churchyard, whose quaint inscriptions we have spelt out together. The infinitely genial old gentleman, who. like the great apostle, was all things to all men, bending readily to let the storm blow past, and then rising again unbroken - unhurt, as it seemed, by the hardest knocks and the hardest words-was at last knocked over by death, and is already on the road to oblivion.

And thou too, poor old Pepper, who, though on thy last legs in those days, still continued to hobble after us while we loitered about garden and glen, with a fidelity which deafness and blindness, and the stiffness of old age, could not shake, until the hour we departed; where art thou now, in the realms of the Unseen? Surely, such faithfulness as thine; such loyal service; such lifelong fidelity, has not been utterly extinguished? But if thou hast indeed perished, on what ground of reason or justice or expediency can A or B or C be permitted to enjoy immortality? Time the avenger is severely impartial; he recognises none of the distinctions which gallantry would suggest; he spares neither man nor woman. The girls that we left behind us have now great girls of their own. Slim Jemima weighs fourteen stone. It would be unfeeling to say that any of the angelic beings of our boyish worship swear like troopers and drink like fish; yet, were we to declare that the mild-eyed and low-voiced Evangeline (who was the belle of the country-side, and who nearly broke our hearts when she married Major Blazeaway, of the Horse Something or other) rates the infirm old warrior in season and out of season, and in accents which her early adorers quite fail to recognise, I should be guilty of no breach of confidence, for the fact is notorious from one end of the community to the other. These poor old battered hulks, that have come back to the port from which they started, are at once ludicrous and pitiable; we are uncertain whether to greet them with laughter or tears, with a jest or a sermon; but there are others, the best and fairest, who have gone down at sea, of whom there can be no words spoken now. In silence only can we recall the pleasant voices which the sea-winds have hushed, and which will not be

VOL. LXXX.-NO. CCCCLXXIX.

Where other groves and other streams along,

And hears the inexpressive nuptial song,
With nectar pure his oozy locks he laves,
In the blest kingdom meek of joy and love.
There entertain him all the saints above
In solemn troops and sweet societies,
That sing, and singing in their glory move,
And wipe the tears for ever from his eyes,

Yes the people change-our life is but a vapour-here we have no continuing city. All that was ever said or thought about the transitoriness of existence is summed up in the half-dozen wordsour life is but a vapour.' How profoundly the writer of these words must have realised the volatility, the want of substance, the fugitiveness of man's life-man whose

breath is in his nostrils. The dreariest scepticism never draped itself in sadder words. But the 'inconstant' sea, at least, changes not. Still, she woos us with the smile she wore when we were boys, her frown is still awful and godlike. All the fierce energy of twenty stormy winters has not worn this rock away the onehundredth part of an inch: how many æons did it need then to carve these colossal pillars, to round

this glorious arch, to fashion that stately temple in the rock? I remember a day thirty years ago when I lay on this very promontory, and looked down upon the shining plain. The sea had precisely the same pearly grey shimmer of delicate light, flashing here and there into silvery spearpoints; the same ships, as it seemed, were passing slowly along, north and south, before the fitful autumn breeze; the wave broke monotonously on the same spar of

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