skipping beasts, or a roaring voice of most savage wild
beasts, or a rebounding echo from the hollow mountains: these things
made them to swoon for fear.'--(Wisdom of Solomon, chapter xvii.)

"That creative faculty of the eye, upon which Mr. De Quincey dwells so
strongly, I have myself experienced. Indeed, it has been the principal
cause of suffering which has connected itself with my habit of opium
eating. It developed itself at first in a recurrence of the childish
faculty of painting upon the darkness whatever suggested itself to the
mind; anon, those figures which had before been called up only at will
became the cause, instead of the effect, of the mind's employment; in
other words, they came before me in the night-time, like real images,
and independent of any previous volition of thought. I have often,
after retiring to my bed, seen, looking through the thick wall of
darkness round about me, the faces of those whom I had not known for
years, nay, since childhood; faces, too, of the dead, called up, as it
were, from the church-yard and the wilderness and the deep waters, and
betraying nothing of the grave's terrible secrets. And in the same way,
some of the more important personages I had read of, in history and
romance, glided often before me, like an assembly of apparitions, each
preserving, amidst the multitudinous combinations of my visions, his own
individuality and peculiar characteristics.--(Vide Emanuel Count
Swedenborg, Nicolai of Berlin's Account of Spectral Illusion, Edinburgh
Phrenological Journal.)

"These images were, as you may suppose, sufficiently annoying, yet they
came and went without exciting any emotions of terror. But a change at
length came over them, an awful distinctness and a semblance of reality,
which, operating upon nerves weakened and diseased, shook the very
depths of my spirit with a superstitious awe, and against which reason
and philosophy, for a time, struggled in vain.

"My mind had for some days been dwelling with considerable solicitude
upon an intimate friend, residing in a distant city. I had heard that
he was extremely ill, indeed, that his life was despaired of; and I may
mention that at this period all my mind's operations were dilatory;
there were no sudden emotions; passion seemed exhausted; and when once
any new train of thought had been suggested, it gradually incorporated
itself with those which had preceded it, until it finally became sole
and predominant,