ll on those that have sinned
that most fearful and unpardonable sin. I felt also such clogging and
heat at my stomach, by reason of this my terror, that I was, especially
at some times, as if my breast-bone would have split asunder.... Thus
did I wind, and twine, and shrink, under the burden that was upon me;
which burden also did so oppress me that I could neither stand, nor go,
nor lie, either at rest or quiet."

"In general I dreaded to be left alone. I remember wondering how other
people could live, how I myself had ever lived, so unconscious of that
pit of insecurity beneath the surface of life. My mother in
particular, a very cheerful person, seemed to me a perfect paradox in
her unconsciousness of danger, which you may well believe I was very
careful not to disturb by revelations of my own state of mind (I have
always thought that this experience of melancholia of mine had a
religious bearing."

On asking this correspondent to explain more fully what he meant by
these last words, the answer he wrote was this:--

"I mean that the fear was so invasive and powerful that if I had not
clung to scripture-texts like 'The eternal God is my refuge,' etc.,
'Come unto me, all ye that labor and are heavy-laden,' etc., 'I am the
resurrection and the life,' etc., I think I should have grown really
insane."[84]

[84] For another case of fear equally sudden, see Henry James: Society
the Redeemed Form of Man, Boston, 1879, pp. 43 ff.

There is no need of more examples. The cases we have looked at are
enough. One of them gives us the vanity of mortal things; another the
sense of sin; and the remaining one describes the fear of the
universe;--and in one or other of these three ways it always is that
man's original optimism and self-satisfaction get leveled with the dust.

In none of these cases was there any intellectual insanity or delusion
about matters of fact; but were we disposed to open the chapter of
really insane melancholia, with its {159} hallucinations and delusions,
it would be a worse story still--desperation absolute and complete, the
whole universe coagulating about the sufferer into a material of
overwhelming horror, surrounding him without opening or end. Not the
conception or intellectual perception of evil, but the grisly
blood-freezing heart-palsying sensation of it close upon one, and no
other conception or sensation able to live for a moment in its
presence. How irrelevantly remote seem