a few white trunks of
decayed trees--with an utter depression of soul which I can compare
to no earthly sensation more properly than to the after-dream of the
reveler upon opium: the bitter lapse into every-day life, the hideous
dropping off of the veil. There was an iciness, a sinking, a sickening
of the heart, an unredeemed dreariness of thought which no goading
of the imagination could torture into aught of the sublime.... It
was possible, I reflected, that a mere different arrangement of the
particulars of the scene, of the details of the picture, would be
sufficient to modify, or perhaps to annihilate, its capacity for
sorrowful impression; and acting upon this idea, I reined my horse to
the precipitous brink of a black and lurid tarn that lay in unruffled
lustre by the dwelling, and gazed down--but with a shudder even more
thrilling than before--upon the remodelled and inverted images of the
gray sedge, and the ghastly tree-stems, and the vacant and eye-like
windows."

Certainly this setting bears very little resemblance to the actual;
but just as certainly its artistic fitness to the tale of terror which
it preludes gives it an imaginative verisimilitude.

As an example of a realistic setting, closely copying the actual, let
us examine the following passage from "Adam Bede" (Chapter XVIII):--

"You might have known it was Sunday if you had only waked up in the
farmyard. The cocks and hens seemed to know it, and made only crooning
subdued noises; the very bull-dog looked less savage, as if he would
have been satisfied with a smaller bite than usual. The sunshine
seemed to call all things to rest and not to labor; it was asleep
itself on the moss-grown cow-shed; on the group of white ducks
nestling together with their bills tucked under their wings; on the
old black sow stretched languidly on the straw, while her largest
young one found an excellent spring-bed on his mother's fat ribs; on
Alick, the shepherd, in his new smock-frock, taking an uneasy siesta,
half-sitting, half-standing on the granary steps."

There is no obvious imaginative fitness in this passage, since in the
chapter where it occurs the chief characters are going to a funeral;
but it has an extraordinary verisimilitude, owing to the author's
accurate observation of the details of life in rural England.

These two passages differ very widely from each other. In one thing,
and one only, are they alike. Each of them exhibits the subtle quality