It is not only the early fancy of the ballad-mongers and fairy tale-tellers that has dwelt longingly on the idea of suspended animation.  All the mystics, who all follow the same dim track that leads to nothing, have believed in various forms of the imaginary Australian experiment.  The seers of most tribes, from Kamschatka to Zululand, and thence to Australia, are feigned to be able to send their souls away, while their bodies lie passive in the magical tent.  The soul wanders over the earthly world, and even to the home of the dead, and returns, in the shape of a butterfly or of a serpent, to the body which has been lying motionless, but uncorruptible, in apparent death.  The Indian Yogis can attain that third state of being, all three being unknown to Brahma, which is neither sleeping nor waking, but trance.  To produce this ecstasy, to do for themselves what some people at the Antipodes pretend to do to sheep and cattle, is the ideal aim of the existence of the Yogi.  The Neoplatonists were no wiser, and Greek legend tells a well-known story of a married mystic whose suspended animation began at last to bore his wife.  “Dear Hermotimus”—­that was his name, if we have not forgotten it—­“is quite the most absent of men,” his spouse would say, when her husband’s soul left his body and took its walks abroad.  On one occasion the philosopher’s spiritual part remained abroad so long that his lady ceased to expect its return.  She therefore went through the usual mourning, cut her hair, cried, and finally burned the body on the funeral-pyre.  “We can do no more for miserable mortals, when once the spirit has left their bones,” says Homer.

At that very moment the spirit returned, and found its uninsured tenement of clay reduced to ashes.  The sequel may be found in a poem of the late Professor Aytoun’s, and in the same volume occurs the wondrous tale of Colonel Townsend, who could suspend his animation at pleasure.

There is certainly a good deal of risk, as well as of convenience, in suspended animation.  People do not always welcome Rip Van Winkle when he returns to life, as we would all welcome Mr. Jefferson if he revisited the glimpses of the footlights,

   “The hard heir strides about the lands,
   And will not yield them for a day.”

There is the horrible chance of being buried alive, which was always present to the mind of Edgar Poe.  It occurs in one of his half-humorous stories, where a cataleptic man, suddenly waking in a narrow bed, in the smell of earthy mould, believes he has been interred, but finds himself mistaken.  In the “Fall of The House of Usher” the wretched brother, with his nervous intensity of sensation, hears his sister for four days stirring in her vault before she makes her escape.  In the “Strange Effects of Mesmerism on a Dying Man,” the animation is mesmerically suspended at the very instant when it was about naturally to cease.  The results, when the passes were reversed, and the half fled life