TRIBUTE. I. BENEATH the sombre cypresses, chance-planted grew, down in a glade, And burly bees from bloom to bloom bore golden gifts on wing and thigh. Came neither sunshine, air, nor bees. II. Bedewed with tears of cypresses, the shadowed tree still upward grew, red; The errant honey-hunters came, and fruit in clusters crowned its head. To load with riches barren trees III. In deeper gloom than cypress shades I lived, long fruitless years, alone, Yet knowing that life must have joys more true than any I had known. Perhaps my faith hath made me whole: the heavens have opened even to me; Thou cam'st, and, cheering, led'st me on to win my upward way to thee My Love! to me as are to trees Fruit-giving sunshine, air, and bees. THE PSYCHOLOGY OF GHOST-CRAFT. PSYCHOLOGY (xn, λoyoç,) means speech or revelation concerning the soul. Dynamize this word, and we have to psychologize, which presents the soul-substance in the attitude of an active and interpenetrative force, and implies a sympathetic object or soul acted upon. Thinking and feeling, functions ascribed to the soul, are susceptible of either being confined within the soul, or projected from itself into another. But the active and spiritual sense of these words is imperfectly perceived by the multitude, and their interpenetrative sense is not allowed. We do indeed say, I feel you, but this means only, I feel within myself that I am in contact with you, not that I project my feeling into you, or receive yours into me; nor does the verb to think ever mean, I project my thought into another's mind, or receive his into mine. For this we have I think, and I learn, which are confined to special knowledges, and do not extend to the thought-substance itself. The development and apprehension of novel possibilities required a new term to express them; and what can be more appropriate than this chaste and precise Greek verb, to psychologize, which ascribes to the soul primary source of thought and feeling— the active projection of our thoughts and feelings, sensations and sentiments, into others? With these elementary dynamics of the soul, magnetizers have almost familiarized the public mind. To spirits, also, of the deceased has been assigned such control of other minds, either in their own life-sphere or in ours, as magnetizers exert upon their subjects, sometimes at great distances. To psychologize is construed, to induce either upon oneself or upon others impressions that are often mistaken for external realities. We have been assured that this is much practiced in the other life. Many ghosts, especially those newly anived on the other side of the Styx, are said to spend most of their time in this quasi-fictitious state, the partial representation of which may be observed among the Orientals, who eat hasheesh or opium; among the Turks and Germans, who smoke themselves into reverie; but especially among the coca-chewers of Bolivia and the neighbor ing countries. It is a pleasure which Nature permits to some, and which others assiduously cultivate, either from its fascination or from the need of taking refuge in an ideal world from the too rude and cruel experiences of their false social positions. This attitude of soul seems to be much easier to the Orientals than to the peoples of Europe and their American descendants, and to be peculiarly incompatible with the climate of our Atlantic coast. Drugs which soothe and elevate the one may in the same dose irritate and madden the other temperament; and this depends on the relations of the blood globule with the nerve vesicle. The Brahmins cultivate, as the highest discipline of the soul, a state of ecstatic contemplation, doubtless often mistaking the indefinite for the infinite, the clouds for the firmament, the loss of earth for the gain of Heaven. They seek to perfect themselves by meditating on the abstract perfections of Brahma, and do, it is reported, so introvert their minds in these spiritual gymnastics as to attain the insensibility of cataleptics. They acquire a genius for the trance state, and leave their bodies long quiescent during their celestial pilgrimages-in one unbroken slumber, from the seed-sowing to the harvest, as English authorities attest. The poet and novelist should possess, as a gift of organization, or develop by culture, the power of psychologizing themselves, and their readers also, in a high degree. For the lack of this, all other talents fail to compensate. Poetry and Romance are our intellectual narcotics: we ask of them oblivion of this world's impertinences, and rendered fluent, gaseous, or aromal, through the subjective magic of their spells, to traverse unobstructed, unchallenged, invisible, new combinations of character, scenery, action, thought, and emotion. The artist must believe a little himself, or the illusion will hardly be perfect for us. The creator must embody himself in his creation bodies are the forms, not the instruments of souls. A true poem or life-story, however wildly improbable its incidents, can be, no more than a planet or a sun, the work and mere effect of an external hand. Paley has nailed himself to the counter in his notorious comparison of the watch. D'Israeli in his Vivian Grey and Contarini Fleming is wonderful in this gift of creative reverie. Longfellow, among our modern poets, preeminently possesses this endowment. His epics live within us. The function of these ministers of the Ideal is to supply ex alted standards by which the crudities of the world may be criticised and gradually corrected. Perverted from this function, and deprived of the criticism of external contact, the endowment engenders self-deceptions and follies. Our ghost-reporter informs us that in the other life persons gradually drop this habit, as they acquire more experience and wisdom. Then they find that the ghostworld, like ours, is real and social; and that in both, heartily to enter into what concerns the public weal is more to the purpose than reverie and introspection, however enticing the cheap marvels of romance which the latter may furnish to its votaries. This does not exclude the creation nor the enjoyment of high works of art only morbid excesses or trivial perversions are in question. Mediums who imagine they see and converse with spirits, are often at such moments psychologized, either by some one in our own life-sphere or in the other. What they see may be a picture limned in correspondence with their thought, according to those organic laws of art which execute themselves. An idea, light but integral, like winged seed, is caught upon the breeze of reverie; it coasts along the labyrinthine convolutions of the brain, it penetrates at last the optic lobes (tubercula quadrigemina), and takes the form of vision there; for the internal senses are open alike to impressions from matter through the outward eye or from spirit through ideas. The thought, so rendered, may be either our own or another's, as to its origin. The extreme facility with which this kind of portrait or scene-painting is accomplished, is known to every one who remembers the phantasmagoria of fevers and of inflammations of the organs of sense. When a child, I was subject to an occasional earache, which always depicted itself, as it were, on my organs of sense as monstrous forceps, big as an obelisk, which, in closing as if to crush me, only pinched up a teenchy little bit of skin, that made my flesh crawl, then opened to repeat the same operation. Another time, during the incipient stage of the varioloid, while the nervous system chiefly was affected, that disease prefigured itself by psychologizing on my vision a rapid succession of dissolving views, often very interesting, but each of which was invariably transformed into something hideous as it disappeared. There is a boldness of figure, apparently, here, of which I am well aware, and which might be objected to as indicating levity of fancy unbecoming my theme. Am I then speaking here of vario loid or earache as of beings, and as thinking or feeling beings, capable of exercising the highest human power,—that of psychologizing a person? I reply: Maladies are concentrated miasms, subversive aromas, corresponding with the mineral, vegetable, and animal poisons in the lower grades of creation. They are, as it were, the disembodied souls of viruses; and again they correspond more or less completely to the graduated scale of vital endowments associated with the organs and faculties of man. Varioloid, for instance, when it invades a person, makes that person over in its own likeness, as to his skin and mucous membranes, so that its daguerreotype may easily be taken; moreover, in a less complete and more confused manner, it fills and modifies the other organic spheres susceptible of entertaining it, such as the blood, which carries its ogre form into the brain, where it comes into intimate conversation with the nerve vesicles, in the spheres of tactile sensation, of certain emotional and instinctual functions, and rises into consciousness by the corresponding ideas. The same miasm, which in one country of the human organism is known as pain, is known in another as ugly thoughts, and in another as ugly pustules. I do not pretend to say that the variola thinks or behaves like a human person, when it is between two pieces of glass, or when it is diffused in the atmosphere; but I do mean to say that, once in correlation with an individual organism, it instantly becomes human form itself, and polarizes with its own peculiar magnetism the thinking element as well as the nutritive element of that person. Some organs or tissues remain unmodified by a given malady this shows that that malady is susceptible of the human form only to a certain extent, or partially. Some maladies localize themselves, and cultivate exclusively a certain organ or a limited segment of the body, on which they may develop parasitic growths. Such are the family of tumors. : I think that maladies exercise a very extensive tyranny in psychologizing mankind. a tyranny at which mankind would do well to be indignant, and against which they ought to make war systematically and very seriously for the recovery of their personal liberty. I know more than one rich slave to neuralgia, in the State of Virginia, who would think his case bettered if he could change lots with his own negro coachman. There is, in states of full health as well in others, at certain times, a peculiar openness or susceptibility of the camera obscura of |