spread,
and sink and change amongst assembled multitudes of men. I have seen the
theatre of the more visible ravages of tyranny and war, cities and
villages reduced to scattered groups of black and roofless houses, and
the naked inhabitants sitting famished upon their desolated thresholds."

On their return to the lake, the Shelleys found M.G. Lewis established
with Byron. This addition to the circle introduced much conversation
about apparitions, and each member of the party undertook to produce a
ghost story. Polidori's "Vampyre" and Mrs. Shelley's "Frankenstein" were
the only durable results of their determination. But an incident
occurred which is of some importance in the history of Shelley's
psychological condition. Toward midnight on the 18th of July, Byron
recited the lines in "Christabel" about the lady's breast; when Shelley
suddenly started up, shrieked, and fled from the room. He had seen a
vision of a woman with eyes instead of nipples. At this time he was
writing notes upon the phenomena of sleep to be inserted in his
"Speculations on Metaphysics", and Mrs. Shelley informs us that the mere
effort to remember dreams of thrilling or mysterious import so disturbed
his nervous system that he had to relinquish the task. At no period of
his life was he wholly free from visions which had the reality of facts.
Sometimes they occurred in sleep, and were prolonged with painful
vividness into his waking moments. Sometimes they seemed to grow out of
his intense meditation, or to present themselves before his eyes as the
projection of a powerful inner impression. All his sensations were
abnormally acute, and his ever-active imagination confused the
border-lands of the actual and the visionary. Such a nature as
Shelley's, through its far greater susceptibility than is common even
when with artistic temperaments, was debarred in moments of high-strung
emotion from observing the ordinary distinctions of subject and object;
and this peculiar quality must never be forgotten when we seek to
estimate the proper proportions of Dichtung and Wahreit in certain
episodes of his biography. The strange story, for example, told by
Peacock about a supposed warning he had received in the spring of this
year from Mr. Williams of Tremadoc, may possibly be explained on the
hypothesis that his brooding thoughts had taken form before him, both
ear and eye having been unconsciously pressed into the service of a
subjective energy. (Fraser's