in any knowledge of such institutions, cannot but shudder
at the mystic sublimity of _castes_ that have flowed apart, and refused
to mix, through such immemorial tracts of time; nor can any man fail to
be awed by the names of the Ganges or the Euphrates. It contributes much
to these feelings that southern Asia is, and has been for thousands of
years, the part of the earth most swarming with human life, the great
_officina gentium_. Man is a weed in those regions. The vast empires
also in which the enormous population of Asia has always been cast, give
a further sublimity to the feelings associated with all Oriental names or
images. In China, over and above what it has in common with the rest of
southern Asia, I am terrified by the modes of life, by the manners, and
the barrier of utter abhorrence and want of sympathy placed between us by
feelings deeper than I can analyse. I could sooner live with lunatics or
brute animals. All this, and much more than I can say or have time to
say, the reader must enter into before he can comprehend the unimaginable
horror which these dreams of Oriental imagery and mythological tortures
impressed upon me. Under the connecting feeling of tropical heat and
vertical sunlights I brought together all creatures, birds, beasts,
reptiles, all trees and plants, usages and appearances, that are found in
all tropical regions, and assembled them together in China or Indostan.
From kindred feelings, I soon brought Egypt and all her gods under the
same law. I was stared at, hooted at, grinned at, chattered at, by
monkeys, by parroquets, by cockatoos. I ran into pagodas, and was fixed
for centuries at the summit or in secret rooms: I was the idol; I was the
priest; I was worshipped; I was sacrificed. I fled from the wrath of
Brama through all the forests of Asia: Vishnu hated me: Seeva laid wait
for me. I came suddenly upon Isis and Osiris: I had done a deed, they
said, which the ibis and the crocodile trembled at. I was buried for a
thousand years in stone coffins, with mummies and sphynxes, in narrow
chambers at the heart of eternal pyramids. I was kissed, with cancerous
kisses, by crocodiles; and laid, confounded with all unutterable slimy
things, amongst reeds and Nilotic mud.

I thus give the reader some slight abstraction of my Oriental dreams,
which always filled me with such amazement at the monstrous scenery that
horror seemed absorbed for a while in sheer astonishment. Sooner o