p. 136 | News and Miscellany

Seventh-day Adventist Publishing Association · Battle Creek, Mich. · Oct 10, 1871

News and Miscellany.

“Can ye not discern the signs of the times?”

Queen Victoria a Spiritualist.

WHATEVER may be the truth in regard to the report that Queen Victoria intends to abdicate the throne of England, it is known that she has been laboring for some years past under at least one phase of mental infirmity. She has a firm conviction that Prince Albert is always present with her, and that she can hold communication with him. Her private rooms are arranged as they were when he was alive. His chair is placed opposite to her own in the library, and the books which he delighted to read to her are arranged lovingly, in order, upon the table. In some of her moods she will converse with him for an hour together, conducting her share of the conversation aloud and with the vigor and interest of old times. He had taught her by his example, the success of his business enterprises—especially by his management of the Duchy of Cornwall—to superintend as much as possible all her private affairs herself; to reduce all unnecessary expenditures, and to forbid extravagance. Hence, the greatest simplicity is observed at the Queen’s table, and she imagines that her husband looks on well pleased. At times, when she is more than ordinarily impressed with a sense of his presence, the poor, fond woman will order a knife and fork to be placed on the dinner-table for him, and cause the attendants to place every course before the empty chair as if the master still occupied it. Every morning a pair of boots are cleaned and set down against the door of the chamber which he once occupied; and at breakfast, when in Scotland, she will often sit a long time in silence, waiting for the prince. The Queen’s strong belief in the communion of the living with the spirits of the dead she received, no doubt, from Prince Albert himself, who was a sort of theosophist—a something between Jacob Behmen, the mystic, and J. G. Fichte, the philosopher of transcendentalism. Whatever may be thought of it as a theory of philosophical or religious belief by sober, common sense people, it is to Victoria a source of great consolation, and she often talks with the prince concerning the state of the soul after death. She has been gradually withdrawing from public life for some years past, and lives in a world of her own. Her harp and her easel are both neglected, and she neither sings, plays, nor paints, except at rare intervals, when she will sweep her harp-strings for a few moments in memory of some sweet German air that her husband loved to sing or to hear sung.