ra ombra vi avra fatto paura."

--_Filippo Pananti_.

"There is a feeling which, perhaps, all have felt at times; . . . it
is a strong and shuddering impression which Coleridge has embodied in
his own dark and supernatural verse that Something not of earth is
behind us--that if we turned our gaze backward we should behold that
which would make the heart as a bolt of ice, and the eye shrivel and
parch within its socket. And so intense is the fancy, that _when_ we
turn, and all is void, from that very void we could shape a spectre
as fearful as the image our terror had foredrawn."--BULWER, _The
Disowned_.

The resemblance and the relation of the shadow to the body is so
strangely like that of the body to the soul, that it is very possible
that it first suggested the latter. It is born of light, yet is in
itself a portion of the mystery of darkness; it is the facsimile of man
in every outline, but in outline alone; filled in with uniform sombre
tint, it imitates our every action as if in mockery, which of itself
suggests a goblin or sprite, while in it all there is something of self,
darkling and dream-like, yet never leaving us. It is only evident in
brightest hours, like a skeleton at an Egyptian feast, and it has neither
more nor less resemblance to man than the latter. Hence it came that the
strange "dwellers by the Nile" actually loved both shade and death by
association, and so it happened that

"Full many a time
They seemed half in love with easeful Death;
Called him soft names in many a mused rhyme,"

while they made of the cool shadow a portion of the soul itself, or
rather one of the seven or eight entities of which man consisted, these
being--_Khat_, a body; _Ba_, the spirit; _Khon_, the intelligence;
_Khaibit_, _the shadow_; _Ren_, the name; _Ka_, eternal vitality; _Ab_,
the heart; and _Sahn_, the mask or mummy.

It is extremely interesting to consider, in connection with this Egyptian
doctrine, the fact, illustrated by every writer on Etruscan antiquity,
that these ancient dwellers in Italy, when they represented the departed,
or the dead, as living again on a tomb, added to the name of the deceased
the word _Hinthial_. This I once believed meant simply a ghost or
spirit. I had no other association with the name.

I inquired for a long time if there was any such name as _Hintial_ for a