178 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



of his profession, and often spent a large portion of the night in practis- 

 ing difficult compositions. The violin was his favorite instrument. 

 At last the shepherd-girl fell ill, and was removed to a charitable insti- 

 tution. Here the attendants were amazed at hearing the most ex- 

 quisite music in the night, in which were recognized finely-rendered 

 passages from the best works of the old masters. The sounds were 

 traced to the shepherd-girl's room, where the patient was found play- 

 ing the violin in her sleep. Awake, she knew nothing of these things, 

 and exhibited no capacity for music. 



A late number of the London Medico- Chirurg leal Remeio^ in an 

 article on apoplexy, speaks of vivid dreams as a common warning in 

 the first and often unrecognized stages of insanity, heart-disease, and 

 phthisis, and one that it would be well to better understand and heed. 

 Vivid dreaming, which in some cases seems to be a mental illumina- 

 tion, and in others a prophecy of impending ill, precedes many dis- 

 eases long before the victim is aware of his condition. These dreams 

 sometimes take the forms of waking fancies, double consciousness, 

 and what is called mystic memory. In February, 1829, when Sir 

 Walter Scott was breaking himself down by severe and protracted 

 literary labor, and was suffering the first invasion of ill health which 

 ultimately ended in death, he wrote in his diary on the 17th, that, on 

 the preceding day, at dinner, although in company with two or three 

 old friends, he was strongly haunted by a "sense of preexistence," a 

 confused idea that nothing that passed was said for the first time ; 

 that the same topics had been discussed, and that the same persons 

 had expressed the same opinions before. " There was," he writes, " a 

 vile sense of a want of reality in all that I did or said." Goethe re- 

 lates that, as he was once in 'an uneasy and unhealthy state of mind, 

 riding along a foot-path toward Drusenheim, he saw himself on horse- 

 back coming toward himself; and similar stories are told of other 

 highly-imaginative persons whose mental balance has been disturbed 

 by over-anxiety or incipient illness. 



The states of physical prostration known as coma soinnolentum. 

 and coma vigil exhibit, in their largest extent, the poetic capacities 

 of the mind. The impressions, dreams, and illusions, in these condi- 

 tions, are such as no healthy miud could possibly conceive. The jja- 

 tient seems to live in a charmed world, amid spectral beings and airy 

 people, changing lights, luminous heights, and appalling shadows ; in 

 short, no glowing epic or work of the painter's art seems so much as 

 to touch upon such richness of imagery. Mrs. Hemans on lier death- 

 bed said that no pen could describe or imagination conceive the 

 visions that passed before her mind, and made her waking hours more 

 delightful than those spent in repose. 



Rev. William Tennent, of Freehold, New Jersey, was an overworked 

 student, and was supposed to be far gone in consumption. In a pro- 

 tracted illness he apparently died, and the preparations were made 



