Hiram Corson was many things: a scholar of Anglo-Saxon literature, a translator of Roman satires, a theorist of education, but above all a diehard fan of the English poet Robert Browning. The Cornell professor dedicated the better part of his career to promoting, explicating, and declaiming Browning's poems to an American audience, as well as founding a club exclusively dedicated to the poet in 1877. Toward the end of his life, Corson's steadfast service was rewarded with one last opportunity to converse directly with the man he regarded as the greatest poetical mind since Shakespeare.
Over the course of several face-to-face exchanges, Browning assured the aging academic of their mutual intellectual understanding and thanked Corson effusively for the years spent propagating his poetry. None of this was particularly remarkable in itself—the two had met decades earlier and had even briefly traveled together in Italy. Far more noteworthy was the fact that at the time of these final conversations, Browning had been in his grave for twenty-two years.
These spectral testimonies, recorded in Corson's book Spirit Messages, were the product of a series of séances held at the home of a Boston medium named Minnie Meserve Soule in 1910. They were celebrity-studded affairs—deceased interlocutors from the sessions included Robert's wife, Elizabeth Barrett Browning; Nathaniel Hawthorne; Alfred Tennyson; William Gladstone; and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, who obligingly brought along a “large band of Indian spirits” to protect the séance from otherworldly interference.
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