"I saw pale kings and princes too,
Pale warriors, death-pale were they all:
They cried--'La Belle Dame sans Merci
Hath thee in thrall!'

"I saw their starv'd lips in the gloam
With horrid warning gaped wide,
And I awoke and found me here,
On the cold hill's side."

From effects so exquisitely wrought as these it seems almost
profane to turn to the crude attempts of such poets as "Monk"
Lewis or Southey to sound the note of terror. Yet they too, in
their fashion, played a part in the "Renascence of Wonder."
Coleridge, fascinated by the spirit of "gramarye" in Buerger's
_Lenore_, etherealised and refined it. Scott and Lewis gloried in
the gruesome details and spirited rhythm of the ballad, and in
their supernatural poems wish to startle and terrify, not to awe,
their readers. Those who revel in phosphorescent lights and in
the rattle of the skeleton are apt to o'erleap themselves; and
Scott's _Glenfinlas_, Lewis's _Alonzo the Brave and the Fair
Imogene_ and Southey's _Old Woman of Berkeley_ fall into the
category of the grotesque. Hogg intentionally mingles the comic
and the terrible in his poem, _The Witch of Fife_, but his
prose-stories reveal his power of creating an atmosphere of
_diablerie_, undisturbed by intrusive mockery. In the poem
_Kilmeny_, he handles an uncanny theme with dreamy beauty.

From the earliest times to the present day, writers of fiction
have realised the force of supernatural terror. In the
_Babylonica_ of Iamblichus, the lovers evade their pursuers by
passing as spectres; the scene of the romance is laid in tombs,
caverns, and robbers' dens, a setting remarkably like that of
Gothic story. Into the English novel of the first half of the
eighteenth century, however, the ghost dares not venture. The
innate desire for the marvellous was met at this period not by
the novel, but by oral tradition and by such works as Galland's
translation of _The Arabian Nights_, the Countess D'Aulnoy's
collection of fairy tales, Perrault's _Contes de ma Mere Oie_.
Chapbooks setting forth mediaeval legends of "The Wandering Jew,"
the "Demon Frigate," or "Dr. Faustus," and interspersed with
anecdotes of freaks, monsters and murderers, satisfied the
craving for excitement among humbler readers.[8] Smollett, who,
in his _Adventures of Ferdinand, Count Fathom_ (1753), seems to
have been experimenting with new devices for keeping alive the
interest of a _picaresque_ novel, anticipates the methods o