touching on the essential phenomena, such as the moving of tables
untouched by a finger.

Our visitor last night, to say nothing of other witnesses, has
repeatedly seen this done with his eyes--in private houses, for
instance, where there could be no machinery--and he himself and his
brother have held by the legs of a table to prevent the motion--the
medium sitting some yards away--and that table has been wrenched from
their grasp and lifted into the air. My husband's sister, who has
admirable sense and excessive scepticism on all matters of the kind, was
present the other day at the house of a friend of ours in Paris, where
an English young lady was medium, and where the table expressed itself
intelligently by knocking, with its leg, responses according to the
alphabet. For instance, the age of my child was asked, and the leg
knocked four times. Sarianna was 'not impressed,' she says, but, 'being
bound to speak the truth, she does not _think it possible that any trick
could have been used_.' To hear her say so was like hearing Mr. Chorley
say so; all her prejudices were against it strongly. Mr. Spicer's book
on the subject is flippant and a little vulgar, but the honesty and
accuracy of it have been attested to me by Americans oftener than once.
By the way, he speaks in it of your interesting 'Recollections,' and
quotes you upon the possibility of making a ghost story better by the
telling--in reference to Washington.

Mr. Tennyson is going to England for a few months, so that our Florence
party is breaking up, you see. He has printed a few copies of his poems,
and is likely to publish them if he meets with encouragement in England,
I suppose. They are full of imagery, encompassed with poetical
atmosphere, and very melodious. On the other hand, there is vagueness
and too much personification. It's the smell of a rose rather than a