OMINOUS VOICES FROM AFAR. 123 out of her reverie as one breaks from a dream." This is no romance of Hero and Leander; nor indeed is the drowning man a drowned one after all, as in the story of old, by modern poet re-told, of Leander, when "Under the ponderous sea his body dips, And Hero's name dies bubbling on his lips. "And hark!-a grieving voice, trembling and faint, "For now, upon each brief and breathless pause On Hero! Hero!" Mr. Crabb Robinson repeats in his Diary a story told him by Charles Becher, of his being one night awakened by a sound of his brother's voice crying out that he was drowning, and it afterwards appeared that the brother was drowned that night. Of such cries, interpreted as warnings of the listener's own impending doom, story and history have many to tell; such mystic sounds as may be typified in a stanza of Wordsworth's,— “That unintelligible cry Hath left him high in preparation,— This very night will meet his fate- That Napoleon was a Corsican born and bred should be taken into account when recalling what M. de Segur tells us of him at the date of the expedition to Russia, that often he was to be seen half reclining on a sofa, plunged in profound meditation-from which state of reverie he would suddenly awake with a convulsive start, and utter an exclamation, fancying he heard himself named, and crying out "Who is calling me?" For the Corsicans, like all mountaineers, as Mr. Merivale observes, are superstitious; their solitary valleys are full of visions, and omens, and "airy tongues that syllable men's names;" and the dead are believed to assemble at midnight under the windows of those about to die, in the spectral habit of the Frati della Misericordia, and go through the mimic show of raising and carrying a bier; and they will also call the living by name, but no one dares answer, for whoever answers is doomed soon to join them. The Corsican Buonaparte however did dare. Talfourd illustrates a like superstition in the Scottish Highlands, in his tragedy of Glencoe. In the first scene Donald hurries in, demanding,— "Is not Mac Ian here? I came to meet him, Angus has the same tale to tell: a fearful summons from a shrill voice, between the tempest's gusts, has called him to meet his chief. So with Halbert, who "shivers as with ague," for he has "heard again old Moina's voice" as he walked in mist that clung round him like a shroud; each cliff, pillar, and cavern echoed back the words, till they appeared to fill the glen with sound: "'twas no delusion; surely as you hear my voice, I heard them." So in the Hellenics of Landor,— "A shriek was carried to the ancient hall Of Thallinos; he heard it not; his son Readers of Balzac's Etudes Philosophiques may remember how the antobiographer in La Peau de Chagrin seemed, at one crisis in his strange eventful history, to hear the voice of his dead mother, calling him by name: "Je ne sais quelle puissance faisait retentir vaguement mon propre nom dans mon oreille, au milieu d'un bruit de cloches." Are we not all familiar with the story of Samuel Johnson, under the influence of that disease which made his senses become morbidly torpid, and his imagination morbidly active, at one time standing in fixed gaze on the town clock without being able to tell the hour; at another, distinctly hearing his mother, who was many THE RESPONSIVE “ADSUM.” 125 miles off,* calling him by his name? The pathetic Adsum! of fine old Colonel Newcome has its parallel in the "Here!" of Cooper's aged Leather-stocking, when the dying trapper, who had remained motionless for an hour, and whose eyes, when occasionally they opened, seemed to fasten their gaze on the clouds of a grand sunset, suddenly rose upright to his feet, supported on either side by his watchful friends, and then with a military elevation of his head, he uttered the monsyllable responsive to a summons audible to him alone. The dying May-Queen of Mr. Tennyson's poem, (which artfully suggests what is natural to account for the supernatural, and artistically blends the two,) all in the wild March morning has heard the angels call: "It was when the moon was setting, and the dark was over all; The trees began to whisper, and the wind began to roll, And in the wild March morning I heard them call my soul. I thought that it was fancy, and I listened in my bed, And then did something speak to me-I know not what was said; And up the valley came again the music on the wind." * Peter Pindar paraphrases the Piozzi version of a dead, not merely a distant, mother; Madame is made to say in the Town Eclogue,— "In ghosts the Doctor strongly did believe; Bozzy and Piozzi, part ii. THE STRIPLING OF BETHLEHEM FLOUTED BY THE GIANT OF GATH. Ο I SAMUEL Xvii. 42. UT of the camp of the Philistines went their champion, Goliath of Gath; his height six cubits and a span; his head protected with a helmet of brass, and his person with a coat of mail weighing five thousand shekels of the same metal, and greaves of the same upon his legs, and a target of the same between his shoulders. Bold as brass, himself, emboldened by the dread his defiances caused in the camp of the Israelites, out he went from the camp of the Philistines, spear in hand, his shield-bearer going before him; for forty days, twice a day, he went forth and renewed his note of defiance. Let Israel choose a man for themselves, and let that man come forth like a man, and fight with him, Goliath of Gath. But all the men of Israel failed to find manhood enough for that. All of them when they saw the Philistine of Gath, and heard his challenge, fled from him, and were sore afraid. But the day dawned for the youngest son of Jesse the Bethlehemite to accept the giant's challenge, stripling and mere shepherd though David might be. When the Philistine that day went out from the camp, what went he out for to see? A stalwart warrior, of inches equal to his own? No such thing. Not even a man, in age, or growth, or aspect. It was a man that Goliath challenged to come down to him, and behold a boy! So, when the Philistine looked about, and saw David, he disdained him: for he was but a youth, and ruddy, and of a fair countenance. "Choose you a MAN for you," had been the terms of Goliath's challenge to the men of Israel, "and let him come down to me." "Give me a MAN, that we may fight together." This stripling, fresh from the sheepfold, with his pastoral staff in his hand, and his sling, and his smooth stones out of the brook in a shepherd's bag, and other arms of offence or defence absolutely none,was this the nearest approach to a man that the men of Israel FLOUTED BY THE GIANT OF GATH. 127 could offer? Was the giant of Gath, then, a dwarf, that he was to be put off with a mere boy? Was he a dog, that that boy came to him with staves? And the Philistine cursed David by his gods. “ Αλλ' ἄνδρα χρὴ, καν σῶμα γεννήσῃ μέγα, Δοκεῖν πεσεῖν ἂν, καν ἀπὸ σμικροῦ κακοῦ,” as the Grecian prince has it in Sophocles. Goliath's despised antagonist might greet him in the style of another warrior in the same play,-sling and stone allowed for, “ Καν ψιλὸς ἀρκέσαιμι σοὶ γ ̓ ὡπλισμένῳ.” Tasso is mindful of the son of Jesse in his description of the Pagan champion in his sixth book: "There all alone Argantes took his stand, Defying Christ and all His servants true; Or that huge giant Jesse's infant slew." * The encounter is of a kind to remind one, inter alia, of the gigantic Gaul in the Volscian plains challenging any one of the Roman youth to single combat, and finding the challenge readily accepted by M. Valerius, who, "by the side of the huge Gaul, looked like a mere stripling," and who was very materially aided in the fight by a crow that confounded the giant by flying in his face, striking him with its beak, and flapping its wings before his face, so that the young Roman had an easy conquest, and might well assume the name of Corvus, by which name he lives to this day. David's style to him of Gath is pitched in the same key with that of Milton's blind captive to the insulting Harapha : * "Then put on all thy gorgeous arms, thy helmet And brigandine of brass, thy broad habergeon, Or, again, of the challenge of a huge Spanish chief, in the third Punic war, which no Roman ventured to accept, save young Scipio, who slew the bulky bully in single combat. |