“I moved my lips; the pilot shrieked
   And fell down in a fit;
   The holy hermit raised his eyes
   And prayed where he did sit. 
   I took the oars; the pilot’s boy,
   Who now doth crazy go,
   Laughed loud and long, and all the while
   His eyes went to and fro.”

This is only poetry, it is true, but the poet borrowed the description from nature, and the records of our asylums could furnish many cases where insanity was caused by a sudden fright.

More than this, hardly a year passes that we do not read of some person, a child commonly, killed outright by terror,—­scared to death, literally.  Sad cases they often are, in which, nothing but a surprise being intended, the shock has instantly arrested the movements on which life depends.  If a mere instantaneous impression can produce effects like these, such an impression might of course be followed by consequences less fatal or formidable, but yet serious in their nature.  If here and there a person is killed, as if by lightning, by a sudden startling sight or sound, there must be more numerous cases in which a terrible shock is produced by similar apparently insignificant causes,—­a shock which falls short of overthrowing the reason and does not destroy life, yet leaves a lasting effect upon the subject of it.

This point, then, was settled in the mind of Dr. Butts, namely, that, as a violent emotion caused by a sudden shock can kill or craze a human being, there is no perversion of the faculties, no prejudice, no change of taste or temper, no eccentricity, no antipathy, which such a cause may not rationally account for.  He would not be surprised, he said to himself, to find that some early alarm, like that which was experienced by Peter the Great or that which happened to Pascal, had broken some spring in this young man’s nature, or so changed its mode of action as to account for the exceptional remoteness of his way of life.  But how could any conceivable antipathy be so comprehensive as to keep a young man aloof from all the world, and make a hermit of him?  He did not hate the human race; that was clear enough.  He treated Paolo with great kindness, and the Italian was evidently much attached to him.  He had talked naturally and pleasantly with the young man he had helped out of his dangerous situation when his boat was upset.  Dr. Butts heard that he had once made a short visit to this young man, at his rooms in the University.  It was not misanthropy, therefore, which kept him solitary.  What could be broad enough to cover the facts of the case?  Nothing that the doctor could think of, unless it were some color, the sight of which acted on him as it did on the individual before mentioned, who could not look at anything red without fainting.  Suppose this were a case of the same antipathy.  How very careful it would make the subject of it as to where he went and with whom he consorted!  Time and patience would be pretty sure to bring out new developments, and physicians, of all men in the world, know how to wait as well as how to labor.