them up till midnight, through candle-light and the unwholesome hours, as they are called,—­would, I am satisfied, in a medical point of view, prove the better caution.—­That detestable picture, as I have said, gave the fashion to my dreams—­if dreams they were—­for the scene of them was invariably the room in which I lay.  Had I never met with the picture, the fears would have come self-pictured in some shape or other—­

  Headless bear, black man, or ape—­

but, 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. 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.

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.