V. It is not, however, in every symbolical subject that the fearful
grotesque becomes embodied to the full. The element of distortion which
affects the intellect when dealing with subjects above its proper
capacity, is as nothing compared with that which it sustains from the
direct impressions of terror. It is the trembling of the human soul in
the presence of death which most of all disturbs the images on the
intellectual mirror, and invests them with the fitfulness and
ghastliness of dreams. And from the contemplation of death, and of the
pangs which follow his footsteps, arise in men's hearts the troop of
strange and irresistible superstitions which, more or less melancholy or
majestic according to the dignity of the mind they impress, are yet
never without a certain grotesqueness, following on the paralysis of the
reason and over-excitement of the fancy. I do not mean to deny the
actual existence of spiritual manifestations; I have never weighed the
evidence upon the subject; but with these, if such exist, we are not
here concerned. The grotesque which we are examining arises out of that
condition of mind which appears to follow naturally upon the
contemplation of death, and in which the fancy is brought into morbid
action by terror, accompanied by the belief in spiritual presence, and
in the possibility of spiritual apparition. Hence are developed its most
sublime, because its least voluntary, creations, aided by the
fearfulness of the phenomena of nature which are in any wise the
ministers of death, and primarily directed by the peculiar ghastliness
of expression in the skeleton, itself a species of terrible grotesque in
its relation to the perfect human frame.

Sec. LXVI. Thus, first born from the dusty and dreadful whiteness of
the charnel house, but softened in their forms by the holiest of human
affections, went forth the troop of wild and wonderful images, seen
through tears, that had the mastery over our Northern hearts for so many
ages. The powers of sudden destruction lurking in the woods and waters,
in the rocks and clouds;--kelpie and gnome, Lurlei and Hartz spirits;
the wraith and foreboding phantom; the spectra of second sight; the
various conceptions of avenging or tormented ghost, haunting the
perpetrator of crime, or expiating its commission; and the half
fictitious and contemplative, half visionary and believed images of the
presence of death itself, doing its daily work in the chambers of
sickness