THE WONDERFUL STORY OF RAVALETTE. ALSO, TOM CLARK AND HIS WIFE, THEIR DOUBLE DREAMS AND THE CURIOUS THINGS THAT BEFELL THEM THEREIN; OR, THE ROSICRUCIAN’S STORY.
BY DR. P. B. RANDOLPH, “THE DUMAS OF AMERICA,” AUTHOR OF “WAA, GU-MAH,” “PRE-ADAMITE MAN,” “DEALINGS WITH THE DEAD,” “IT ISN’T ALL RIGHT,” “THE UNVEILING OF SPIRITISM,” “THE GRAND SECRET,” “HUMAN LOVE--A PHYSICAL SUBSTANCE,” ETC., ETC., ETC.
“The fictions of genius are often the vehicles of the sublimest verities, and its flashes often open new regions of thought, and throw new light on the mysteries of our being.”--
CHANNING.
NEW YORK: SINCLAIR TOUSEY, 121 NASSAU STREET. 1863.
ENTERED according to Act of Congress, in the year 1863, by P. B. RANDOLPH,
In the Clerk’s Office of the District Court of the United States, for the Southern District of New York.
INTRODUCTORY.
In giving what follows to the world, no one can be more alive to the fact that this is the latter half of the nineteenth century, and that the present is emphatically the era of the grandest Utilitarianism, Revolution, Matter of Fact, and Doubt that the world ever knew, than is the editor of the following extraordinary tale. He has no apologies to make for offering it--no excuses, even as a novelist, for departing from the beaten track of “War, Love, Murder, and Revenge,” “Politics, Passion, and Prussic acid,” which constitute the staple of the modern novel.
Disliking all long exordia, we propose to enter at once upon the work before us, by inquiring: Is there such a thing as real magic--not the ordinary, chemical, ambidextral jugglery, that passes current among the vulgar as magic--but the real old mysterious thing, whereof we read in old black-letter tomes?
Utterly repudiating the pretensions of modern charlatans, and conscienceless impostors, who deal in “spirit photographs,” and utter misty phrases about “Life in the Spheres,” “Gloria,” and “Jubilo,” together with schemes to reform the world--namely, by means of Indiana divorces, improved “Lieceums,” “Air-lying dispatches,” via _Caput Assinorum_, and much other.