ght pillow, this
nurse-child of optimism will start at shapes, unborrowed of tradition,
in sweats to which the reveries of the cell-damned murderer are
tranquillity.

Gorgons, and Hydras, and Chimaeras--dire stories of Celaeno and the
Harpies--may reproduce themselves in the brain of superstition--but
they were there before. They are transcripts, types--the archetypes
are in us, and eternal. How else should the recital of that, which we
know in a waking sense to be false, come to affect us at all?--or

--Names, whose sense we see not,
Fray us with things that be not?

Is it that we naturally conceive terror from such objects, considered
in their capacity of being able to inflict upon us bodily injury?--O,
least of all! These terrors are of older standing. They date beyond
body--or, without the body, they would have been the same. All the
cruel, tormenting, defined devils in Dante--tearing, mangling,
choking, stifling, scorching demons--are they one half so fearful
to the spirit of a man, as the simple idea of a spirit unembodied
following him--

Like one that on a lonesome road
Doth walk in fear and dread,
And having once turn'd round, walks on,
And turns no more his head;
Because he knows a frightful fiend
Doth close behind him tread.[1]

That the kind of fear here treated of is purely spiritual--that it
is strong in proportion as it is objectless upon earth--that it
predominates in the period of sinless infancy--are difficulties,
the solution of which might afford some probable insight into our
antemundane condition, and a peep at least into the shadow-land of
pre-existence.

My night-fancies have long ceased to be afflictive. I confess an
occasional night-mare; but I do not, as in early youth, keep a stud of
them. Fiendish faces, with the extinguished taper, will come and look
at me; but I know them for mockeries, even while I cannot elude their
presence, and I fight and grapple with them. For the credit of my
imagination, I am almost ashamed to say how tame and prosaic my dreams
are grown. They are never romantic, seldom even rural. They are of
architecture and of buildings--cities abroad, which I have never seen,
and hardly have hope to see. I have traversed, for the seeming length
of a natural day, Rome, Amsterdam, Paris, Lisbon--their churches,
palaces, squares, market-places, shops, suburbs, ruins, with an
inexpressible sense of delight--a map-like distinctness of trace--and
a day-lig