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I was dreadfully alive to nervous terrors. The night-time solitude, and the dark, were my hell. The sufferings I endured in this nature would justify the expression. I never laid my head on my pillow, I suppose, from the fourth to the seventh or eighth year of my life–so far as memory serves in things so long ago–without an assurance, which realized its own prophecy, of seeing some frightful spectre. Be old Stackhouse then acquitted in part, if I say, that to his picture of the Witch raising up Samuel–(O that old man covered with a mantle!) I owe–not my midnight terrors, the hell of my infancy–but the shape and manner of their visitation. It was he who dressed up for me a hag that nightly sate upon my pillow–a sure bed-fellow, when my aunt or my maid was far from me. All day long, while the book was permitted me, I dreamed waking over his delineation, and at night (if I may use so bold an expression) awoke into sleep, and found the vision true. I durst not, even in the day-light, once enter the chamber where I slept, without my face turned to the window, aversely from the bed where my witch-ridden pillow was.–Parents do not know what they do when they leave tender babes alone to go to sleep in the dark. The feeling about for a friendly arm–the hoping for a familiar voice–when they wake screaming–and find none to soothe them–what a terrible shaking it is to their poor nerves! The keeping 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]