's Tale" (in "Redgauntlet"), the right atmosphere is
found, the right note is struck. All is vividly real, and yet, if you
close the book, all melts into a dream again. Scott was almost equally
successful with a described horror in "The Tapestried Chamber." The idea
is the commonplace of haunted houses, the apparition is described as
minutely as a burglar might have been; and yet we do not mock, but
shudder as we read. Then, on the other side--the side of
anticipation--take the scene outside the closed door of the vanished Dr.
Jekyll, in Mr. Stevenson's well-known apologue:

They are waiting on the threshold of the chamber whence the doctor has
disappeared--the chamber tenanted by what? A voice comes from the room.
"Sir," said Poole, looking Mr. Utterson in the eyes, "was that my
master's voice?"

A friend, a man of affairs, and a person never accused of being fanciful,
told me that he read through the book to that point in a lonely Highland
chateau, at night, and that he did not think it well to finish the story
till next morning, but rushed to bed. So the passage seems "well-found"
and successful by dint of suggestion. On the other side, perhaps, only
Scotsmen brought up in country places, familiar from childhood with the
terrors of Cameronian myth, and from childhood apt to haunt the lonely
churchyards, never stirred since the year of the great Plague choked the
soil with the dead, perhaps _they_ only know how much shudder may be
found in Mr. Stevenson's "Thrawn Janet." The black smouldering heat in
the hills and glens that are commonly so fresh, the aspect of the Man,
the Tempter of the Brethren, we know them, and we have enough of the old
blood in us to be thrilled by that masterpiece of the described
supernatural. It may be only a local success, it may not much affect the
English reader, but it is of sure appeal to the lowland Scot. The
ancestral Covenanter within us awakens, and is terrified by his ancient
fears.

Perhaps it may die out in a positive age--this power of learning to
shudder. To us it descends from very long ago, from the far-off
forefathers who dreaded the dark, and who, half starved and all untaught,
saw spirits everywhere, and scarce discerned waking experience from
dreams. When we are all perfect positivist philosophers, when a thousand
generations of nurses that never heard of ghosts have educated the
thousand and first generation of children, then the supernatural may fade
out o