To James Martin December 10, 1844.

I have been thinking of you, my dear Mr. Martin, more and more the colder it has been, and had made up my mind to write to-day, let me feel as dull as I might.  So, the vane only turns to you instead of to dearest Mrs. Martin in consequence of your letter—­your letter makes that difference.  I should have written to Dover in any case....

You are to know that Miss Martineau’s mesmeric experience is only peculiar as being Harriet Martineau’s, otherwise it exhibits the mere commonplaces of the agency.  You laugh, I see.  I wish I could laugh too.  I mean, I seriously wish that I could disbelieve in the reality of the power, which is in every way most repulsive to me....

Mrs. Martin is surprised at me and others on account of our ‘horror.’  Surely it is a natural feeling, and she would herself be liable to it if she were more credulous.  The agency seems to me like the shaking of the flood-gates placed by the Divine Creator between the unprepared soul and the unseen world.  Then—­the subjection of the will and vital powers of one individual to those of another, to the extent of the apparent solution of the very identity, is abhorrent from me.  And then (as to the expediency of the matter, and to prove how far believers may be carried) there is even now a religious sect at Cheltenham, of persons who call themselves advocates of the ‘third revelation,’ and profess to receive their system of theology entirely from patients in the sleep.

In the meantime, poor Miss Martineau, as the consequence of her desire to speak the truth as she apprehends it, is overwhelmed with atrocious insults from all quarters.  For my own part I would rather fall into the hands of God than of man, and suffer as she did in the body, instead of being the mark of these cruel observations.  But she has singular strength of mind, and calmly continues her testimony.

Miss Mitford writes to me:  ’Be sure it is all true.  I see it every day in my Jane’—­her maid, who is mesmerised for deafness, but not, I believe, with much success curatively.  As a remedy, the success has been far greater in the Martineau case than in others.  With Miss Mitford’s maid, the sleep is, however, produced; and the girl professed, at the third seance, to be able to see behind her.

I am glad I have so much interesting matter to look forward to in the ‘Eldon Memoirs’ as Pincher’s biography.  I am only in the first volume.  Are English chancellors really made of such stuff?  I couldn’t have thought it.  Pincher will help to reconcile me to the Law Lords perhaps.

And, to turn from Tory legislators, I am vainglorious in announcing to you that the Anti-Corn-Law League has taken up my poems on the top of its pikes as antithetic to ‘War and Monopoly.’  Have I not had a sonnet from Gutter Lane?  And has not the journal called the ‘League’ reviewed me into the third heaven, high up—­above the pure ether of the five points?  Yes, indeed.  Of course I should be a (magna) chartist for evermore, even without the previous predilection.