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.[21] 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 midnight 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.

[Footnote 21: Thornton Hunt.]

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.[22]

[Footnote 22: Mr. Coleridge's Ancient Mariner.]

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
ante-mundane 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