Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Vol. 3, No. 15, August, 1851

"I presume that many of you remember the case of Rachel Baker, the Somnambulist-preacher, who, some twenty-eight or thirty years ago, in one of the interior counties of this State, attracted so much the wonder and curiosity of the public. She was an ignorant, unlettered girl, of some nineteen or twenty years of age. Her parents were poor, and were unable to give her any education. She could read the Bible only with great difficulty, and even that little with apparently but small understanding of the force and extent of its moral and religious teachings. Although indigent and ignorant, her character, however humble and undeveloped, was unblemished. She was of a religious turn of mind, and was a regular attendant of the Methodist meetings, which were only occasionally held in the sparsely-populated neighborhood where she resided.

"Such was the young girl who subsequently became the theme of almost every journal in the United States, and whose fame, or perhaps more properly notoriety, extended to England and France; awakening in each country elaborate psychological and physiological discussions concerning the nature of the peculiar case of 'Rachel Baker, the American Somnambulist.' But I am getting a little before my story.

"One hot evening, about midsummer, somewhat earlier than was usual with her, Rachel took a candle and ascended the ladder which served as stairs to lead to the open chamber or garret which contained her humble bed. A short time after midnight, her mother, being accidentally awake, and talking with her father, heard her, as she expressed, 'gabbling to herself in a dream.' She called aloud to her daughter, but received no answer; but her talk, in a low tone of voice, continued as before. The mother now awoke her husband, and lighting a candle, they ascended together to Rachel's apartment.

"She lay upon her bed on her back, her face turned to the rafters and shingled roof of the rude dwelling. Her eyes were wide open; her hands clasped convulsively over her bosom; and she was pronouncing a prayer. After finishing her prayer, she lay silent for a few moments, and then awakening with a start, and gazing wildly around her, she demanded to know of her wonder-stricken and agitated parents, why they were there, and 'what that light was for?'

"'You waked your father and me, by talking in your sleep, Rachel; when we called to you, you did not answer, and we came up to see what was the matter. You've been dreaming, haven't you, Rachel?'

"'No, mother, I've had no dream; you have wakened me from a sound and sweet sleep.'

"The parents retired, went down the ladder to their own apartment, and Rachel fell into a sound sleep, and slept until morning. All the following day, however, she was indisposed; her eyes were heavy, her step faltering, and her whole manner indolent and ennuyée. The same somnambulism occurred every night for a week; until at length the rumor of the phenomena was noised about the country, and excited a wide and general curiosity. And when inquiry was made of the mother as to the character of Rachel's 'talk in her sleep,' she said, 'It was first-rate preaching – as good as any minister's; and her prayers,' she added, 'was beautiful to hear.'

"About this time Mr. W – G – , a man of rare self-attainments in practical science and philosophy, and of the highest reputation for general intelligence – (an ornament, moreover, to the agriculturists of New York, toward whose interests no man in the State subsequently more efficiently contributed) – invited Rachel to pass a short time at the house of his father, an opulent farmer in the little town of O – , in the county of Onondaga.

"She came after some considerable persuasion; and here it was, being at that time on a tour in the western part of the State, that I first saw the remarkable spiritual development of which I spoke a while ago. Rachel had already spoken three nights, utterly unconscious to herself, although surrounded by gradually-increasing numbers, who had been attracted by a natural curiosity to hear her. Up to this time she had not herself been made aware of the continuance of her 'sleep-talking.' During the day she would assist the family in various domestic matters; and she was given to understand by Mr. G – , that it was intended to assist her to attain such proficiency in a common education as would enable her to read the Bible freely, to understand its plainest precepts, to write and to speak with grammatical correctness. She seemed anxious to avail herself of such an opportunity, and was thus entirely deceived as to the real purpose of the visit which she was induced to make.

"The house of Mr. G – contained upon the ground-floor four apartments; an 'east' and 'west room,' the first of which contained the library of the younger Mr. G – , an organ, &c.; and the second was the 'spare room,' par excellence, in other words, the best parlor: these were connected by an 'entry' or passage-way; and opening into this parlor was another large room, where the family took their meals, held family worship, &c. Adjoining this room was a large kitchen. But let me describe the scene on the first night in which I saw Rachel Baker.

"It was on the evening of a hot day in summer. I had been permitted to come into the dining-room with the family, and was seated accidentally near the unconscious somnambulist. Conversation turned upon various matters, as it was intended purposely to prevent the least suspicion of there being any curiosity concerning her. The 'men-folks' talked of harvesting and other agricultural matters, and the 'women-kind' of their domestic affairs. Meanwhile twilight was deepening; the 'east room' was filling with the neighbors, who approached in a direction whence they could not be seen by any of us who were in the sitting-room. I was saying something to Rachel of an indifferent nature, when I thought I saw a slight twitching about the eyelids, and an unwonted heaviness in the expression of her eyes. The conversation was now vigorously renewed, but she seemed to be gradually losing all interest in it; and presently she observed, 'I am tired and sleepy, and I guess I'll go to bed.' 'Certainly, Rachel, if you wish,' said Mrs. G – ; 'take a candle with you.'

"She left the chair in which she had been sitting by my side, took up a candle, bade us 'good-night,' left the room, and closed the door behind her.

"All was now expectation. We heard the subdued rustling of the crowd in the 'east room,' while we in the sitting-room were awaiting the involuntary signal which would render it proper to enter the parlor where the bed of the somnambulist was placed. Presently a subdued groan was heard. We seized the candles which had been lighted after she had retired, and entered her apartment, into which also was pouring a crowd of persons from the 'east room.'

"I shall never forget the scene that was now presented. The face of the somnambulist, which, without being handsome, was extremely interesting, was turned toward the ceiling; her large blue eyes were wide open, and their pupils seemed to fill the entire eye-balls, giving her what the Germans call an "interior" or soul-look. Her hands were crossed upon her bosom over the bed-clothes; nor did she once move them, or her eyes, so much even as to wink, during the whole evening. And so tightly did she press them, that the blood settled for the time under her nails, and at length grew black like the fingers of a corpse. She lay for the space of a few minutes motionless and silent. She then began a short prayer in a voice calm and solemn, which, although, not at all loud, could be heard plainly in all the apartments, while the hushed attention of the hearers kept the house as still as the grave. I remember that the prayer was fervent, brief, and beautiful, and in language simple and pure.

"After the prayer, she lay for some time silent and motionless; affording space, as some supposed, for the singing of a hymn, as in the regular exercises of the sanctuary. Then she began her discourse, which usually continued about half an hour. It was not a discourse from any particular text, although it was connected, regular, and nobly illustrated by the most apposite quotations from the Bible. If interrupted by any questions, she would pause, make answer, and immediately resume the broken chain of her remarks. The evening I was present, a distinguished clergyman of this city, who had come expressly to visit her, interrupted her with:

"'Rachel, why do you consider yourself called upon to address your fellow-sinners, and by what authority do you speak.'

"'I even I,' she answered, 'a woman of the dust, am moved by the Spirit which liveth and moveth all things. Necessity is laid upon me; for I speak through Him who hath said, "Upon my young men and maidens will I pour out my Spirit, and the young men shall see visions and the young maidens dream dreams."' The passage quoted was to this purport. Although the somnambulist was utterly ignorant of correct language, never speaking, when awake, without the grossest blunders in grammar, yet in all passages and discourses which she delivered in her somnambulent state, in all the answers to questions which were propounded to her she never committed the slightest error. I wish I could remember a passage of her discourse the second night I heard her. It was replete with the most admirable imagery, and its pathos was infinitely touching. She was visited at the house of Mr. G – by some of the most eminent clergymen and savans of New York, and other cities; among others, if I remember rightly, by the celebrated Dr. Samuel L. Mitchell. After her discourse was finished, she would be silent and motionless, as before she began it, then pronounce a prayer; and at last relapse into a disturbed slumber, from which she would gradually arouse, groaning as if in pain, her hands relaxing and falling by her side, and her frame trembling as if 'rent with mortal agony.'

"Her somnambulism continued for some two or three months afterward; all physical remedies were tried, but without avail. She died in about a year afterward, her case baffling to the last all attempts at explanation of the mysterious agency by which it was produced."

Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes tells us how the members of the medical profession feel when the "poison-chalice" of their prescriptions is commended to their own lips; in other words, when the visitor becomes the visitee:

"Just change the time, the person, and the place
And be yourself the 'interesting case;'
You'll gain some knowledge which it's well to learn;
In future practice it may serve your turn.
Leeches, for instance – pleasing creatures quite;
Try them, and, bless you! don't you think they bite?
You raise a blister for the smallest cause,
And be yourself the great sublime it draws;
And, trust my statement, you will not deny
The worst of draughtsmen is your Spanish Fly.
It's mighty easy ordering when you please,
'Infusi Sennæ, capiat uncias tres';
It's mighty different when you quackle down
Your own three ounces of the liquid brown.
'Pilula Pulvis' – pleasant words enough,
When other jaws receive the shocking stuff;
But oh! what flattery can disguise the groan,
That meets the gulp which sends it through your own!"

"Ah! they are very busy and bustling here now, but they will all be still enough by-and-by," said a clergyman from the country, as he passed with his friend, for the first time, through Cortlandt-street into crowded Broadway, at its most peopled hour. "And," said our informant (the friend alluded to, who had lived in the Great Metropolis all his life), "I never before felt so forcibly, so sudden was the observation, and so fervent the expression of the speaker, the truth of his remark. To me, the scene before us was an every-day one; to him, spending his days in the calm retirement of the country, the crowd, the roaring of the wheels, the sumptuous vehicles of Wealth, and the bedizened trappings of Pride, presented a contrast so strong, that the exclamation which he made was forced from him by the overpowering thought: "Ye busy, hurrying throng, ye rich men, ye vain and proud men, where will all these things be, where will you be seventy years from now?" "After all," says Sydney Smith, "take some thoughtful moment of life, and add together two ideas of pride and of man: behold him, creature of a span high, stalking through infinite space, in all the grandeur of littleness. Perched on a speck of the universe, every wind of heaven strikes into his blood the coldness of death; his soul floats from his body like melody from the string. Day and night, as dust on the wheel, he is rolled along the heavens, through a labyrinth of worlds, and all the creations of God are flaming above and beneath. Is this a creature to make himself a crown of glory? to mock at his fellows, sprung from the dust to which they must alike return? Does the proud man not err? does he not suffer? does he not die? When he reasons, is he never stopped by difficulties? When he acts, is he never tempted by pleasures? When he lives, is he free from pain? when he dies can he escape the common grave? Pride is not the heritage of man. Humility should dwell with Frailty, and atone for ignorance, error, and imperfection."

That sort of curiosity which invests murderers and their secret motives with so much interest, instances of which may be seen any week almost in our very midst, was finely satirized many years ago by a writer in one of the English or Scottish periodicals. The criminal was arrested for the murder of an old woman, who had no money to tempt his avarice, and he resisted all inquiries touching the motives which induced him to commit the horrid deed. He "couldn't tell," he said; "it was a sudden impulse – a sort of a whisper; Satan put it into his head." He had no reason for doing it; didn't know why he did it. Ladies brought tracts and cakes to his prison, and begged him to "make a clean breast of it." Why did he do it? "Lord knows," said he, "I don't." At his trial the jury brought him in guilty, but recommended him to mercy, provided he gave his reasons. He said he "hadn't any; he killed the old 'oman off-hand; it was a sudden start – the same as a frisk: he couldn't account for it; it was done in a dream, like." Finally the day appointed for his execution arrived; and the sheriff, under-sheriffs, clergy, reporters, etc., all implored him to make a full confession, now that his time had come. A phrenologist, knowing that although "Murder had no tongue, it could speak with most miraculous organ," felt the devoted head, but was none the wiser. The interest in the murderer was now increased tenfold; and such was the demand for locks of the culprit's hair, that when he was led forth to the scaffold, there remained upon his head but a few carroty clippings; "and all this while," says the writer in parenthesis, "there was poor old Honesty toiling for a shilling a day, wet or shine, and not one Christian man or woman to ask him for so much as one white hair of his head!" Well, the murderer, unyielding to the end, stands at last upon the scaffold, the focus of the gaze of ten thousand sons and daughters of curiosity, in the street, at the windows, on the house-tops. The hangman is adjusting the rope; the clergyman is reading the death-service; the fatal bolt is about to be withdrawn; when a desperate individual, in a straw-hat, a light blue jacket, striped trowsers, and Hessian boots, with an umbrella under his arm, dashes in before the clergyman, and in hurried accents puts the old question, "Why did you do it?" "Why, then," said the convict, with an impatient motion of his cropped head, "I did it —to get my hair cut!" And he had not miscalculated the sympathy with crime which was to denude his guilty head for "keep sakes!"

Those who have risen early on a Sabbath morning in the country, and experienced the solemn stillness and holy calm of the hour, will read the following lines with something of the religious fervor with which they came warm from the heart of the author:

"How calm comes on this holy day!
Morning unfolds the eastern sky,
And upward takes his lofty way
Triumphant to her throne on high.
Earth glorious wakes as o'er her breast
The morning flings her rosy ray,
And blushing from her dreamless rest
Unvails her to the gaze of day:
So still the scene each wakeful sound
Seems hallowed music breathing round.

"The night-winds to their mountain caves,
The morning mist to heaven's blue steep
And to their ocean depths the waves
Are gone, their holy rest to keep,
'Tis tranquil all, around, above,
The forests far which bound the scene
Are peaceful as their Maker's love,
Like hills of everlasting green.
And clouds like earthly barriers stand,
Or bulwarks of some viewless land."

Now those lines came to our recollection on one occasion many months since, simply by way of direct contrast, which is one of the curious, if not unexplainable operations of the human mind. We had been reading a long description, in a letter from a traveler, of life in the English coal-mines and of the "Sabbath privileges" of the thirty-five thousand men and boys who labor in the vast coal-fields of Durham and Northumberland, in England. There they are, and there they spend their long nights of labor, for day is not for them, hundreds of fathoms down in subterranean depths; never breathing pure air, but often stagnant and exhausted, when the stream of ventilation does not permeate the ever-lengthening gallery, and are almost always inhaling noxious gases. Not only is the atmospheric medium rarefied by a perpetual summer heat, without one glimpse of summer day, but every now and then occur terrific explosions of the "fire-damp," instantaneously thundering through a Vulcanian region, with more certain death to all within its range than there was ever dealt by artillery on the surface of the earth: or a gush of poisonous vapor in one moment extinguishes the candles and the lives of the workmen, and changes the scene of unceasing toil into a catacomb inconceivably more awful than any of the great receptacles of death that bear that name: or the ill-propped vault gives way, and bodies, never to be seen until the resurrection, are buried under the ruins of a pestilential cavern: often, too, life is sacrificed to carelessness or parsimony, and a few "indulgences" are perhaps given to the widow and orphans, to hush up the "casualty" within the neighborhood of the pit. Seldom does a visitor venture to plunge into the Hades-like profound. No attraction in the scenery of the miserable villages above ground brings a stranger to meddle with a population that never come to the surface except to eat or sleep. Yes, there is one exception. On that thrice happy day of rest, when even the burden of the beast is unloosed, the sober, humbly-clad colliers, as clean as they can make themselves, emerge from darkness into light, and hear from the lips of some brother "pitman," in their own familiar patois, the "glad tidings of salvation."

There are numerous pictures of Napoleon: Napoleon in scenes of triumph in peace, and of sublime grandeur in war. He has been depicted crossing the Alps; at Marengo, at Austerlitz, at the bridge of Lodi, at Jena, at Moscow, by the Nile; gazing at the everlasting pyramids; entering sacked cities, bivouacked at night, and the like. But of all the pictures that we have ever seen of the Great Captain, one which has pleased us most, and which seems to represent him in the most gratifying light, is a picture which depicts him sitting upon a sofa in his library, a book in his hand, which he is perusing attentively; while his little son, reclining on one end of the sofa, lies asleep with his head resting on his father's lap – pillowed on those adipose limbs, that look as if they had been melted and run into the close-fitting breeches which they inhabit. This is a picture which, unlike the others, represents the great original as "one of us" – a man and a father, and not as a successful warrior or a triumphant victor.

Speaking nearly a century ago, an old English worthy laments the "good old times" when a book was bequeathed as an invaluable legacy, and if given to a religious house, was offered on the altar, and deemed a gift worthy of salvation; and when a prelate borrowed a Bible, his cathedral gave a bond for its return. Libraries then consisted of a few tracts, chained or kept in chests. The famous Library of Oxford, celebrated by Humphrey, Duke of Gloucester, contained only six hundred volumes! What would then have been thought of the "making of many books," of which "there is no end" in these our days?

There is a striking example of the style of "Sir Pertinax Mac Sycophant," in a character of Marston's "What you Will." Here is a slight specimen of his "booing and booing:"

"Sir, I protest I not only take distinct notice of your dear rarities of exterior presence, but also I protest I am most vehemently enamored, and very passionately dote on your inward adornments and habilities of spirit. I protest I shall be proud to do you most obsequious vassalage."

We find upon a scrap in the "drawer" these two stanzas taken from a German hymn, entitled, "Kindliches Gemüthe," or Childlike Temper:

"His mother's arms his chief enjoyment;
To be there is his loved employment;
Early and late to see her face,