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 Chimæras--dire stories of Celæno 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.
My night-fancies have long ceased to be afflictive. I confess an
occasional night-mare; but I do not, as in early youth, keep a stud of
them. Fiendish faces, with the extinguished taper, will come and look
at me; but I know them for mockeries, even while I cannot elude their
presence, and I fight and grapple with them. For the credit of my
imagination, I am almost ashamed to say how tame and prosaic my dreams
are grown. They are never romantic, seldom even rural. They are of
architecture and of buildings--cities abroad, which I have never seen,
and hardly have hope to see. I have traversed, for the seeming length
of a natural day, Rome, Amsterdam, Paris, Lisbon--their churches,
palaces, squares, market-places, shops, suburbs, ruins, with an
inexpressible sense of delight--a map-like distinctness of trace--and
a day-light vividness of vision, that was all but being awake.--I have
formerly travelled among the Westmoreland fells--my highest Alps,--but
they are objects too mighty for the grasp of my dreaming recognition;
and I have again and again awoke with ineffectual struggles of the
inner eye, to make out a shape in any way whatever, of Helvellyn.
Methought I was in that country, but the mountains were gone. The
poverty of my dreams mortifies me. There is Coleridge, at his will
can conjure up icy domes, and pleasure-houses for Kubla Khan, and
Abyssinian maids, and songs of Abara, and caverns,
Where Alph, the sacred river, runs,
to solace his night solitudes--when I cannot muster a fiddle. Barry
Cornwall has his tritons and his nereids gamboling before him in
nocturnal visions, and proclaiming sons born to Neptune--when my
stretch of imaginative activity can hardly, in the night season,
raise up the ghost of a fish-wife. To set my failures in somewhat a
mortifying light--it was after reading the noble Dream of this poet,
that my fancy ran strong upon these marine spectra; and the poor
plastic power, such as it is, within me set to work, to humour my
folly in a sort of dream that very night. Methought I was upon the
ocean billows at some sea nuptials, riding and mounted high, with the
customary train sounding their conchs before me, (I myself, you may be
sure, the _leading god_,) and jollily we went careering over the main,
till just where Ino Leucothea should have greeted me (I think it was
Ino) with a white embrace, the billows gradually subsiding, fell from
a sea-roughness to a sea-calm, and thence to a river-motion, and that
river (as happens in the familiarization of dreams) was no other than
the gentle Thames, which landed me, in the wafture of a placid wave
or two, alone, safe and inglorious, somewhere at the foot of Lambeth
palace.
The degree of the soul's creativeness in sleep might furnish no
whimsical criterion of the quantum of poetical faculty resident in the
same soul waking. An old gentleman, a friend of mine, and a humorist,
used to carry this notion so far, that when he saw any stripling of
his acquaintance ambitious of becoming a poet, his first question
would be,--"Young man, what sort of dreams have you?" I have so much
faith in my old friend's theory, that when I feel that idle vein
returning upon me, I presently subside into my proper element of
prose, remembering those eluding nereids, and that inauspicious
inland landing.
[Footnote 1: Mr. Coleridge's Ancient Mariner.]