to nervous terrors. The night-time solitude,
and the dark, were my hell. The sufferings I endured in this nature
would justify the expression. I never laid my head on my pillow, I
suppose, from the fourth to the seventh or eighth year of my life--so
far as memory serves in things so long ago--without an assurance,
which realized its own prophecy, of seeing some frightful spectre. Be
old Stackhouse then acquitted in part, if I say, that to his picture
of the Witch raising up Samuel--(O that old man covered with a
mantle!) I owe--not my midnight terrors, the hell of my infancy--but
the shape and manner of their visitation. It was he who dressed up for
me a hag that nightly sate upon my pillow--a sure bed-fellow, when
my aunt or my maid was far from me. All day long, while the book was
permitted me, I dreamed waking over his delineation, and at night
(if I may use so bold an expression) awoke into sleep, and found
the vision true. I durst not, even in the day-light, once enter the
chamber where I slept, without my face turned to the window, aversely
from the bed where my witch-ridden pillow was.--Parents do not know
what they do when they leave tender babes alone to go to sleep in the
dark. The feeling about for a friendly arm--the hoping for a familiar
voice--when they wake screaming--and find none to soothe them--what a
terrible shaking it is to their poor nerves! The keeping them up till
midnight, through candle-light and the unwholesome hours, as they are
called,--would, I am satisfied, in a medical point of view, prove the
better caution.--That detestable picture, as I have said, gave the
fashion to my dreams--if dreams they were--for the scene of them was
invariably the room in which I lay. Had I never met with the picture,
the fears would have come self-pictured in some shape or other--

Headless bear, black man, or ape--

but, as it was, my imaginations took that form.--It is not book,
or picture, or the stories of foolish servants, which create these
terrors in children. They can at most but give them a direction. Dear
little T.H. who of all children has been brought up with the most
scrupulous exclusion of every taint of superstition--who was never
allowed to hear of goblin or apparition, or scarcely to be told of bad
men, or to read or hear of any distressing story--finds all this world
of fear, from which he has been so rigidly excluded _ab extra_, in his
own "thick-coming fancies;" and from his little midni