Daily National Democrat

Library Ghosts.

The present age of the world is getting to be very largely devoted to the supernatural. Ghost seers are not uncommon, and the believers in the appearance of spirits, after death are neither few nor far between. Our readers, probably, have noticed the accounts, in the Atlantic papers, of the silent, staid and solemn ghost recently seen standing, at midnight, in the stillness of the Astor House Library, New York, apparently examining the books. We have never been an especial believer in ghosts, but, we have always thought, that, if there was any place in the world where ghosts might be found—always excepting graveyards—it would be in a library; particularly in those vast, dim, and mysterious libraries, which make one feel, as he journeys solitarily through them, as if he were alone in a mighty realm of shadows, the only real and palpable thing amidst the shades of past existences. In the deep silence of these rooms, we have often felt, as we opened the leaves of some musty tome and pored over their revelations, that the shade of the long-dead author might be looking over our shoulder to see what we were reading, and we have found ourselves shuddering at the very idea of looking around us. Strange, what foolish fancies puzzle the brains of even the most practical of us! As we wander down the long avenues of books, in the solemn shadows of the midnight hour, or even in the mystic half-twilight of the day, how we dread, at every echo of our own steps, to turn and look, like the man described by Coleridge, who walks the lonesome path and

"Because he knows a frightful fiend
Doth close behind him tread."

Although we may not expect to behold a "frightful fiend," or even any other apparition, yet we cannot divest ourselves of the notion that we may see something—something lying beyond the ordinary. Turning over the leaves of the History of England, in the solitude of the surrounding books, we find ourselves cursing the infernal judicial beast and monster, Jeffreys. An echo brings us a whisper from behind, and we half imagine that the old defunct is grinning in our rear, and shaking at us his long, bony finger. Reading of the glories and the shame of Almighty Rome, we heap our imprecations upon the name of Nero, the infamous, and Caligula, the accursed. What, if the dead Emperors were beside us, with the power to blast our very souls with their sepulchral breath? Is the bloody Robespierre looking over our shoulder as we read his deeds of fiendish barbarity, and call down the vengeance of Heaven upon his soul, at every pause and period, hoping that he may be roasted upon Hell's hottest gridiron for a thousand years? Think you that Robespierre the disembodied, would be less vindictive than Robespierre, in the flesh? Imagination does not so conceive it. Is the rollicking Charles II., with his Nell Gwynn by his side, laughing in our very face, as we run over the histories of his mad cap court? Or was that draped figure which we saw, or imagined we saw, glide from the corner as we took down the volume of the wondrous and immortal story of a Lost Paradise, indeed the sublime old master who strung his lyre in the stern and majestic days of the old-time Puritans? What stately shadow was that, which flickered along the walls and vanished, as we read, "Quousque tandem abutere, Catilina, patientia nostra?" Verily, the air of these old books and their dim surroundings is peopled with imagined forms, if not the realities, and scarcely could we wonder if the Immortals stood before us.