Spiritualism
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SPIRITUALISM.—
Mrs. Hatch gave a spiritual utterance in Brooklyn last evening—a singular compound of wisdom and blather, mixed with most daring flights of scientific prophecy and knowledge.1 In the sayings of this lady, and indeed in all the addresses of the chieftains and chieftainesses of Spiritualism, there is no more divulged than any thoughtful and learned person could divulge without supernatural aid. But the wonder is that the Spiritualists put in so much real thought, of an elevated character. One would anticipate nothing but wildness and shallowness from them—and truly they give forth plenty of both. But it is no less true that they once in a while express a fine thing.
"Spiritualism" is spreading with great rapidity, that is plain. It is upheld by thirty or forty newspapers and magazines—has a number of ministers preaching it to special congregations of Spiritualists, and finds an earnest welcome in many of the fashionable parlors of the land. What is to come of all this?
Notes:
1. Walt Whitman was acquainted with Cora Tappan (then Cora Hatch) in 1857. He mentioned her in his June 20, 1857 letter to Sarah Tyndale. Tappan, born in 1840 in Cuba, New York, was a medium. At age ten, as she sat with slate and pencil in hand, "she lost external consciousness, and on awaking she found her slate covered with writing." At fourteen she was a public speaker, and at sixteen married Dr. B. F. Hatch, who published and wrote an introduction to her Discourses on Religion, Morals, Philosophy, and Metaphysics (1858). In 1871, now Cora Tappan, she published a collection of poems entitled Hesperia; the section "Laus Natura" was dedicated to "Walt Whitman, the Poet of Nature." Whitman wrote to Tappan on May 5, 1871, acknowledging receipt of a copy of the book that Tappan had sent him and promising to pay her a visit the next time he was in New York. [back]