LETTER XVIII.

Presentiments-Sensitiveness of Women-Description from Lord Byron illustrative of the Subject-How Presentiments are realized-Quickness of the Senses in Matters of deep Interest.

MY DEAR FRIEND,

Having had my attention lately drawn to some rather obscure, but interesting feelings of the human mind, it has occurred to me to make them the subject of a letter, convinced that they will be recognised with pleasure in description, by those who have experienced them in reality.

Perhaps there are few men who have not, at some period of their lives, felt a presentiment of approaching events, and taken credit to themselves for sagacity, when the result has corresponded with the anticipation. In some persons there seems to be a peculiar susceptibility of this nature. While the perceptions of all around them are limited to the present,

they appear to have a quickness of apprehension which reaches far into the future, resembling, in some degree, the instinct of those birds which are said to prepare their plumage for the storm, long before it has gathered in the heavens so as to be remarkable to the eye. In general, women have this sensitiveness of apprehension in a greater degree than men ; and in regard to many events, especially such as are not brought about by any intricate combinations formed by the reasoning powers, I should be inclined to place more reliance on the prescient faculty of an inexperienced female, than on that of the man of the world or the profound philosopher. We may apply to the sex what has been so beautifully said of a delicate plant :

"Weak with nice sense, the chaste mimosa stands,
From each rude touch withdraws her timid hands ;
Oft, as light clouds o'erpass the summer glade,
Alarmed she trembles at the passing shade;
And feels alive, through all her tender form,
The whisper'd murmurs of the gathering storm."

When we come to look into this subject,

* Darwin-Botanic Garden.

there appears to be nothing particularly wonderful about it. A presentiment is, in fact, a conclusion deduced by the mind from various circumstances, with a rapidity too great to allow it to recollect the steps of the process; being similar, in this respect, to those seemingly intuitive judgments formed by men of almost all professions, regarding the objects appertaining to their regular pursuits. "There is," says Sir Joshua Reynolds, "in the commerce of life, as in art, a sagacity which is far from being contradictory to right reason, and is superior to any occasional exercise of that faculty, which supersedes it, and does not wait for the slow progress of deduction, but goes at once, by what appears a kind of intuition, to the conclusion. A man, endowed with this faculty, feels and acknowledges the truth, though it is not always in his power, perhaps, to give a reason for it; because he cannot recollect and bring before him all the materials that give birth to his opinions."

In a similar way spring up those presentiments of approaching fate under which we

* Discourse.

sometimes labour. By the incidents and appearances around us, a complex impression is made on the mind, for which it scarcely knows how to account. Something unusual has excited its attention, its hopes or its fears, and it grasps all the circumstances of its position, and draws an inference as to the future, with an intuitive quickness, a precision and a truth almost in appearance preternatural.

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Presentiment," says Madame Roland, consists in that rapid survey which is made of a crowd of evanescent circumstances impossible to enumerate, which are rather felt than recognised, which give a tinge to the mind that reason cannot justify, but that events ultimately appear to confirm.*

"Combinations of the mind," says another writer," in all matters of deep interest, are formed as quick as thought, and act like the foretellings of prophecy."†

It is particularly worthy of attention, that in almost all cases of presentiment, a lively interest has been excited in reference to the

* Appeal to Impartial Posterity.
† Hajji Baba, Vol. II. p. 235.

subject of it. It is not the mere love of speculation which sets the mind on interrogating the future, on interpreting present appearances, on pressing forward to meet the "events which cast their shadows before." It is some deep feeling which seizes the indications of what is to come, which expatiates delighted over the lovely prospect on which day has still to dawn, or listens with alarm to the knell that time has not yet heard. How often the anxious mother detects danger in the first little cough of her blooming daughter, and through a long vista of anxious days and wakeful nights, sees the apparition of a tomb!

This prophetic feeling of the future is admirably described by Lord Byron. I might refer you to the passage in his works, but the trouble of the search would interrupt the train of thought into which I have aimed to bring my reader, and I will therefore quote the lines at length. He is speaking of Brussels before the battle of Waterloo :

There was a sound of revelry by night,
And Belgium's capital had gathered then
Her beauty and her chivalry, and bright
The lamps shone o'er fair women and brave men ;