百度搜索 伊利亚随笔 天涯 或 伊利亚随笔 天涯在线书库 即可找到本书最新章节.
We are too hasty whe down our aors in the gloss for fools, for the monstrous insistencies (as they seem to us) involved in their creed of witchcraft. In the relations of this visible world we find them to have been as rational, and shrewd to dete historialy, as ourselves. But when ohe invisible world was supposed to be opened, and the lawless agency of bad spirits assumed, what measures of probability, of decy, of fitness, or proportion -- of that which distinguishes the likely from the palpable absurd -- could they have to guide them in the reje or admission of any particular testimony? -- That maidens pined away, wasting inwardly as their waxen images ed before a fire -- that was lodged, and cattle lamed -- that whirlwinds uptore in diabolic revelry the oaks of the forest-or that spits ales only danced a fearful-i vagary about some rustics kit when no wind was stirring -- were all equally probable where no law of agency was uood. That the prince of the powers of darkness, passing by the floomp of the earth, should lay preposterous siege to the weak fantasy of i eld -- has her likelihood nor unlikelihood à priori to us, who have no measure to guess at his policy, or standard to estimate what rate those anile souls may fet the devils market. Nor, when the wicked are expressly symbolized by a goat, was it to be wo so much, that he should e sometimes in that body, and assert his metaphor. -- That the intercourse e all between both worlds erhaps the mistake -- but that once assumed, I see no reason for disbelieving oested story of this nature more than another on the score of absurdity. There is no law to judge of the lawless, or by which a dream may be criticised.I have sometimes thought that I could not have existed in the days of received witchcraft; that I could not have slept in a village where one of those reputed hags dwelt. Our aors were bolder or more obtuse. Amidst the universal belief that these wretches were in league with the author of all evil, holdiributary to their muttering, no simple Justice of the Peace seems to have scrupled issuing, or silly Headbh serving, a warrant upon them -- as if they should subpoena Satan! -- Prospero in his boat, with his books and wand about him, suffers himself to be veyed away at the mercy of his eo an unknown island. He might have raised a storm or two, we think, on the passage. His acquiesce is i analogy to the noance of witches to the stituted powers. -- What stops the Fiend in Spenser from tearing Guyon to pieces -- or who had made it a dition of his prey, that Guyon must take assay of the glorious bait -- we have no guess. We do not know the laws of that try.
From my childhood I was extremely inquisitive about witches and witch-stories. My maid, and more legendary aunt, supplied me with, good store. But I shall mention the act which directed my curiosity inally into this el. In my fathers book-closet, the History of the Bible, by Stackhouse, occupied a distinguished station. The pictures with which it abounds -- one of the ark, in particular, and another of Solomons temple, delied with all the fidelity of ocular admeasurement, as if the artist had been upon the spot -- attracted my childish attention. There icture, too, of the Witch raising up Samuel, which I wish that I had never seen. We shall e to that hereafter. Stackhouse is in two huge tomes -- and there leasure in removing folios of that magnitude, which, with infiraining, was as much as I could manage, from the situation which they occupied upon an upper shelf. I have not met with the work from that time to this, but I remember it sisted of Old Testament stories, orderly set down, with the obje appeo each story, and the solution of the obje regularly tacked to that. The obje was a summary of whatever difficulties had been opposed to the credibility of the history, by the shrewdness of a or modern iy, drawn up with an almost plimentary excess of dour. The solution was brief, modest, and satisfactory. The bane and antidote were both before you. To doubts so put, and so quashed, there seemed to be an end for ever. The dragon is dead, for the foot of the veriest babe to trample on. But -- like as was rather feared than realised from that slain monster in Spenser -- from the womb of those crushed errors young dragos would creep, exceeding the prowess of so tender a Saint Gee as myself to vanquish. The habit of expeg objes to every passage, set me upon starting more objes, for the glory of finding a solution of my own for them. I became staggered and perplexed, a scepti long coats. The pretty Bible stories which I had read, or heard read in church, lost their purity and siy of impression, aurned into so many historic or ologic theses to be defended against whatever impugners. I was not to disbelieve them, but -- the hing to that -- I was to be quite sure that some one or other would or had disbelieved them. o making a child an infidel, is the letting him know that there are infidels at all. Credulity is the mans weakness, but the childs strength. 0,></a> how ugly sound scriptural doubts from the mouth of a babe and a sug -- I should have lost myself in these mazes, and have pined away, I think, with sufit sustenance as these husks afforded, but for a fortunate piece of ill-fortune, which about this time befel me. Turning over the picture of the ark with too much haste, I unhappily made a brea its ingenious fabric-driving my insiderate fingers right through the twer quadrupeds the elephant, and the camel -- that stare (as well they might) out of the two last windows he steerage in that unique piece of naval architecture. Stackhouse was heh locked up, and became an interdicted treasure. With the book, the objes and solution gradually cleared out of my head, and have seldom returned sin any force to trouble me. -- But there was one impression which I had imbibed from Stackhouse, whio lock or bar could shut out, and which was destio try my childish nerves rather more seriously. -- That detestable picture!
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 hth 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 ermitted me, I dreamed waking over his deliion, 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, oer the chamber where I slept, without my face turo the window, aversely from the bed where my witch-ridden pillow was. -- Parents do not know what they do when they leave tender babes aloo 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 o soothe them -- what a terrible shaking it is to their poor he keeping them up till midnight, through dle-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 se of them was invariably the room in which I lay. Had I never met with the picture, the fears would have e 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 at most but give them a dire. Dear little T.N. who of all children has been brought up with the mos<var></var>t 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 sidly excluded ab extra, in his own "thiing fancies;" and from his little midnight pillow, this nurse-child of optimism will start at shapes, unborrowed of tradition, is to which the reveries of the cell-damned murderer are tranquillity.
Gons, and Hydras, and Chimeras -- 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, aernal. How else should the recital of that, which we know in a waking seo be false, e to affect us at all? -- or
-- Names, whose sense we see not,
Fray us with things that be not?
Is it that we naturally ceive terror from such objects, sidered 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, scorg demons -- are they one half so fearful to the spirit of a man, as the simple idea of a spirit unembodied following him -
Like ohat on a lonesome road
Doth walk in fear and dread,
And having ournd round, walks on,
And turns no more his head;
Because he knows a frightful fiend
Doth close behind him tread*.
[Footnote] * Mr, Ces A Mariner
That the kind of fear here treated of is purely spiritual -- that it is strong in proportion as it is objectless upoh -- that it predominates in the period of sinless infancy -- are difficulties, the solution of which might afford some probable insight into our ante-mundane dition, and a peep at least into the shadow-land of pre-existence.
My night-fancies have long ceased to be afflictive. I fess an occasional nightmare; but I do not, as in early youth, keep a stud of them. Fiendish faces, with the extinguished taper, will e and look at me; but I know them for mockeries, even while I ot 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 seemih 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 distiness of trace -- and a day-light vividness of vision, that was all but being awake. -- I have formerly travelled amon<mark></mark>g the Westmoreland fells -- my highest Alps, -- but they are objects too mighty for the grasp of my roaming reition; and I have again and again awoke with iual struggles of the inner eye, to make out a shape in any way whatever, of Helvellyhought I was in that try, but the mountains were gohe poverty of my dreams mortifies me. There is Ce, at his will jure up ies, 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 uster a fiddle. Barry wall has his tritons and his nereids gamboling before him in noal visions, and proclaiming sons born to une -- when my stret藏书网aginative activity 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, withi to work, to humour my folly in a sort of dream that very night. Methought I on the o billows at some sea nuptials, riding and mounted high, with the ary train sounding their chs before me, (I myself, you may be sure, the leading god,) and jollily we went careering over the main, till just where Ihea should have greeted me (I think it was Ino) with a white embrace, the billows gradually subsiding, fell from a sea-rougho a sea-calm, and theo a river-motion, and that river (as happens in the familiarization of dreams) was no other than the gehames, which landed me, in the wafture of a lucid wave or two, alone, safe and inglorious, somewhere at the foot of Lambeth palace. The degree of the souls 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 being a poet, his first question would be, -- "Young man, what sort of dreams have you?" I have so much faith in my old friends theory, that when I feel that idle veiurning upon me, I presently subside into my proper element of prose, remembering those eluding nereids, and that inauspicious inland landing.
百度搜索 伊利亚随笔 天涯 或 伊利亚随笔 天涯在线书库 即可找到本书最新章节.