Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: 49 A REVELATION OF A PREVIOUS LIFE. " Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting: The soul that rises in us, our life's star, Has had elsewhere its setting, And cometh from afar." Wordswobth. The death of a lady, in a foreign land, leaves me at liberty to narrate the circumstances which follow. A few words of previous explanation, however. I am inclined to believe, from conversations on the subject with many sensible persons, that there are few men who have not had, at different intervals in their lives, sudden emotions, currents of thought, affections of mind and body, which not only were wholly disconnected with the course of life thus interrupted, but seemed to belong to a wholly different being. Perhaps I shall somewhere touch the reader's experience by describing rather minutely, and VOL. II. E in the first person, some sensations of this kind not unusual to myself. Walking in a crowded street, for example,, in perfect health, with every faculty gaily alive, I suddenly lose the sense of neighbourhood. I see—I hear—but I feel as if I had become invisible where I stand, and was, at the same time, present and visible elsewhere. I know every thing that passes around me, but I seem disconnected and (magnetically speaking) unlinked from the human beings near. If spoken' to at such a moment, I answer with difficulty. The person who speaks seems addressing me from a world to which I no longer belong. At the same time, I have an irresistible inner consciousness of being present in another scene of every-day life—where there are streets, and houses, and people—where I am looked on without surprise as a familiar object—where I have cares, fears, objects to attain—a different scene altogether, and a different life from the scene and life of which I was a mom...