effects upon humanity, the brute creation, and physical nature,—­and his imaginary conflicts between the hostile armies of heaven, and his celestial and Satanic personifications, has had so much influence in Anglo-Saxon culture, that nine-tenths of the people believe, without knowing it, as firmly in “Paradise Lost” as in the text of the Bible.  The Governor of Texas, citing in his proclamation a familiar passage in Shakspeare as emanating from the inspired pen of the Psalmist, is not to so great extent an example of ignorance as an illustration of the lofty peerage instinctively assigned the great dramatist in the ordinary associations of our thoughts.  This faith in the visionary world of poets is instilled into us (and it is for this reason that Rousseau, in his masterly work on education, the “Emile,” reprobates the custom as promotive of superstition) in early infancy by our parents and nurses with their stories of nymphs, fairies, elves, dwarfs, giants, witches, hobgoblins, and the like fabulous beings, and, as soon as we are able to read, by the tales of genii, sorcerers, demons, ghouls, enchanted caves and castles, and monsters and monstrosities of every name.  The exceedingly impressible and poetical nature of children (for all children are poets and talk poetry as soon as they can lisp) appropriates and absorbs with intense relish these fanciful myths, and for years they believe more firmly in their truth than in the realities of the actual world.  And I more than suspect that this child-credulity rather slumbers in the grown man, smothered beneath superimposed skepticisms and cognitions, than is ever eradicated from his mind, and thus, upon the shock of an emergency disturbing him suddenly to the foundation, is ready to burst up through the crevices of his shattered practical experience and appear on the surface of his judgment and understanding.

In addition, then, to an instinctive tendency to religious superstition, (of which I shall here say nothing,) to the fairy mythology of the nursery, and the phantom machinery invented by poets to clothe with the semblance of reality their dreams and fancies, can be traced in a great measure the existence in the mind of the credulity which renders the fear in question possible, opening an introduction for it into the heart excited by inexplicable phenomena or circumstanced where such phenomena might, according to our superstitious beliefs, easily occur.

Without entering into an analysis of the fear itself, beyond the remark that any extraordinary sight or sound not immediately explicable by the eye or ear to the understanding (as a steamboat to the Indians or a comet to our ancestors) is a legitimate cause of the emotion, as well as the possibility of the occurrence of such sights and sounds, for believing which we have seen man prepared, first by natural superstitious inclination, and secondly by a peculiar education,—­I will only further add, for