In laughs hysteric were displayed,
  Was always there before them;
This had its due effect with some
Who straight departed, muttering, Hum! 642
  Transparent hoax! and Gammon! 
But these were few:  believing souls,
Came, day by day, in larger shoals,
As the ancients to the windy holes
’Neath Delphi’s tripod brought their doles,
  Or to the shrine of Ammon.

The spirits seemed exceeding tame,
Call whom you fancied, and he came; 650
The shades august of eldest fame
  You summoned with an awful ease;
As grosser spirits gurgled out
From chair and table with a spout,
In Auerbach’s cellar once, to flout
The senses of the rabble rout,
Where’er the gimlet twirled about
  Of cunning Mephistopheles,
So did these spirits seem in store,
Behind the wainscot or the door,
Ready to thrill the being’s core
Of every enterprising bore 662
  With their astounding glamour;
Whatever ghost one wished to hear,
By strange coincidence, was near
To make the past or future clear
  (Sometimes in shocking grammar)
By raps and taps, now there, now here—­
It seemed as if the spirit queer
Of some departed auctioneer 670
Were doomed to practise by the year
  With the spirit of his hammer: 
Whate’er you asked was answered, yet
One could not very deeply get
Into the obliging spirits’ debt,
Because they used the alphabet
  In all communications,
And new revealings (though sublime)
Rapped out, one letter at a time,
  With boggles, hesitations, 680
Stoppings, beginnings o’er again,
And getting matters into train,
Could hardly overload the brain
  With too excessive rations,
Since just to ask if two and two
Really make four? or, How d’ ye do? 
And get the fit replies thereto
In the tramundane rat-tat-too,
  Might ask a whole day’s patience.

’Twas strange (’mongst other things) to find 690
In what odd sets the ghosts combined,
  Happy forthwith to thump any
Piece of intelligence inspired,
The truth whereof had been inquired
  By some one of the company;
For instance, Fielding, Mirabeau,
Orator Henley, Cicero,
Paley, John Ziska, Marivaux,
Melancthon, Robertson, Junot, 699
Scaliger, Chesterfield, Rousseau,
Hakluyt, Boccaccio, South, De Foe,
Diaz, Josephus, Richard Roe,
Odin, Arminius, Charles le gros,
Tiresias, the late James Crow,
Casabianca, Grose, Prideaux,
Old Grimes, Young Norval, Swift, Brissot,
Malmonides, the Chevalier D’O,
Socrates, Fenelon, Job, Stow. 
The inventor of Elixir pro,
Euripides, Spinoza, Poe, 710
Confucius, Hiram Smith, and Fo,
Came (as it seemed, somewhat de trop)
With a disembodied Esquimaux,
To say that it was so and so,
  With Franklin’s expedition;