Some of the words, as expressions of fellowship, were very precious to
me, and I hold it very good of him to write to me that best sort of
encouragement. I was much impressed with the fact--which you have told
me--that he was the original of the "visionary boy" in "Oldtown
Folks;" and it must be deeply interesting to talk with him on his
experience. Perhaps I am inclined, under the influence of the facts,
physiological and psychological, which have been gathered of late
years, to give larger place to the interpretation of vision-seeing as
subjective than the professor would approve. It seems difficult to
limit--at least to limit with any precision--the possibility of
confounding sense by impressions derived from inward conditions with
those which are directly dependent on external stimulus. In fact, the
division between within and without in this sense seems to become
every year a more subtle and bewildering problem."
In 1834, while Mr. Stowe was a professor in Lane Theological Seminary
at Cincinnati, Ohio, he wrote out a history of his youthful adventures
in the spirit-world, from which the following extracts are taken:--
"I have often thought I would communicate to some scientific physician
a particular account of a most singular delusion under which I lived
from my earliest infancy till the fifteenth or sixteenth year of my
age, and the effects of which remain very distinctly now that I am
past thirty.
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