Haunted House," S. T.
Coleridge's "Ancient Mariner," and some other weird works of poetry
have also been found serviceable in producing that strange chill of
the blood, that creeping kind of feeling all over you, which is one of
the enjoyments of Christmastide. Coleridge (says the late Mr. George
Dawson)[88] "holds the first place amongst English poets in this
objective teaching of the vague, the mystic, the dreamy, and the
imaginative. I defy any man of imagination or sensibility to have
'The Ancient Mariner' read to him, by the flickering firelight on
Christmas night, by a master mind possessed by the mystic spirit of
the poem, and not find himself taken away from the good regions of
'ability to account for,' and taken into some far-off dreamland, and
made even to start at his own footfall, and almost to shudder at his
own shadow. You shall sit round the fire at Christmas time, good men
and true every one of you; you shall come there armed with your patent
philosophy; that creak you have heard, it is only the door--the list
is not carefully put round the door, and it is the wintry wind that
whistles through the crevices. Ghosts and spectres belong to the olden
times; science has waved its wand and laid them all. We have no
superstition about us; we walk enlightened nineteenth-century men; it
is quite beneath us to be superstitious. By and bye, one begins to
tell tales of ghosts and spirits; and another begins, and it goes all
round; and there comes over you a curious feeling--a very
unphilosophical feeling, in fact, because the pulsations of air from
the tongue of the storyteller ought not to bring over you that
peculiar feeling. You have only heard words, tales--confessedly by the
storyteller himself only tales, such as may figure in the next monthly
magazine for pure entertainment and amusement. But why do you feel so,
then? If you say that these things are mere hallucinations, vague
air-beating or tale-telling, why, good philosopher, do you feel so
curious, so all-overish, as it were? Again, you are a man without the
least terror in you, as brave and bold a man as ever stepped: living
man cannot frighten you, and verily the dead rise not with you. But
you are brought, towards midnight, to the stile over which is gained a
view of the village churchyard, where sleep the dead in quietness.
Your manhood begins just to ooze away a little; you are caught
occasionally whistling to keep your courage up; you do not expect to