more horrible than all the creation of dark brooding
incubus.

Like most other men of an ardent and imaginative temperament, I was
dissatisfied with the dull routine of ordinary things. I used to feed my
fancy with creatures of the possible, and, without the aid of artificial
stimulants of the brain, often conjured up imaginary beings and
predicaments which had a charm for me, I cannot very well explain or
account for. I cared little for dreams, or the artificial combinations
produced by narcotics; they had too little of reality for me: I never
was satisfied with a mere effort of the fancy, where the judgment was
entirely in abeyance, or at least mocked by what it had no control over.
In the world around me, I found food for my appetite; whatever I saw or
heard of the _real_, I wrought upon in my solitary moments, till I
produced creations, that, being actually within the limits of the
possible, I could survey with the satisfaction that I was contemplating
what might or would be actually experienced in some future stage of the
world. Yet it is a fact--and no one who knows anything of morbid
indulgences of this kind can doubt it--that it is questionable, even to
myself, whether, upon the whole, I ever derived any real pleasure from
these moods of the mind. The imaginary positions I loved most, were
generally of the painful kind: the greater the sufferings of the
personages concerned in my various plots of combined circumstances, the
more was my propensity gratified. From this morbid state of excitement,
I was, of course, often precipitated, by the mere decay of the cerebral
energy that fed it; and when I was forced again to contemplate and mix
with the common affairs of life, I felt the contrast operate to the
disadvantage of even the most stirring incidents that are daily
befalling mankind. I was, indeed, much in the position of those who
stimulate the fancy by extraneous applications; all the boasted efforts
of judgment I tried to mix up with and control the workings of my fancy,
I found were but a species of delusive energies, to take myself out of a
class of dreamers I heartily despised. I was, in fact, just as complete
a visionary as they--with this difference,--I thought I required to
satisfy the condition of a waking judgment, which, after all, had very
little to do in the matter.

There was, however, one peculiarity of my character not found among my
class of visionaries. I was always anxious to throw myself in