A college class-mate, (Poor B——! the shadows of the Pyramids now fall upon his early grave!) a young man easily agitated, to be sure, and possibly timid, on his way home, late one autumn night, from the house of a relative in the country, was hurrying past a dismal old burying-yard in the midst of a gloomy wood, when he was suddenly startled by a strange noise a short distance from the road.  Turning his head, alarmed, in the direction whence it proceeded, he was horror-struck at seeing through the darkness a white object on the ground, struggling as if in the grasp of some terrible monster.  Instantly the blood froze in his veins; he stood petrified,—­the howlings of the wind, clanking of chains, and groans of agony, filling his ears,—­with his eyes fixed in terror upon the white shape rolling and plunging and writhing among the tombs.  Attempting to run, his feet refused to move, and he swooned and fell senseless in the road.  A party of travellers, happening shortly to pass, stumbled over his body.  Raising him upon his feet, they succeeded by vigorous shakes in restoring him to a state of consciousness.

While explaining to them the cause of his fright, the noise was renewed.  The men, although somewhat alarmed, clubbed their individual courage, climbed the wall, and found—­nearly in the centre of the graveyard—­an old white horse thrown down by his fetters and struggling violently to regain his feet.

B——­ assured me, the explanation of the spectacle instinctively occurring to his mind at the moment as indubitable was that some reprobate had just been buried there, and that the Devil, coming for his body, was engaged in binding his unwilling limbs, preparatory to carrying him away!

The reader may smile at the weakness and folly displayed in this case, but the assertion may nevertheless be safely ventured, that there is not one person in a hundred who would not under the same circumstances have been greatly disturbed, or would have invented a much less frightfully absurd solution of the phenomenon than poor B——­’s.

I think the singular feelings associated with graveyard darkness, which the wisest and bravest of men find slumbering beneath all their courage and philosophy, would be found upon investigation to proceed principally from two sources,—­a constitutional inclination to religious superstition, and an acquired educational belief in the reality of the dreams and fancies of poets, mingled, of course, with some natural cowardice.

The dryest and hardest men have more poetry in them than they or we begin to suspect.  Indeed, if we could take our individual or collective culture to pieces and award to each separate influence its due and just share of results, I should not be surprised at finding that the poet had done more in the way of fashioning our education than the scientist or any other teacher.  Milton, to give but a single example, with his speculations concerning the Fall,—­its