the weird waving of your black gown in the
draught, made such an impression even on me merely in consequence of the
alarm your shriek had excited, that I could have fancied _anything_
myself, if I wasn't pretty strong-headed, and rather prosaic. As it
was, I did half fancy an unknown Presence in the room."

"Yes, but you say _inward_ thoughts," replied Hazlet eagerly. "Now
these _weren't_ my inward thoughts; on the contrary they flashed on me
like a revelation, and the strange word, `And,' (for I read distinctly,
`_And_ this is--') was to me like an awful copula connecting time and
eternity for ever. I had always thought of quite another, quite a
different hell; but this showed me for the first time that the state of
sinfulness is _the_ hell of sin. It was only the other day that I came
across those lines of Milton--oh, how true they are--

"Which way I fly is hell, _myself am hell_,
And in the lowest deep a lower deep
Still gaping to devour me opens wide,
To which the hell I suffer seems a heaven."

"It was the truth conveyed in those lines which I then first discovered,
and discovered, it seems to me, from without. I know very very little--
I am shamefully ignorant, but I do think that the vision of that night
taught me more than a thousand volumes of scholastic theology. And let
me say too," he continued humbly, "that by it I was plucked like a brand
from the burning; by it my conversion was brought about."

None of the others were in a mood to criticise the phraseology of
Hazlet's religious convictions, and he clearly desired that the subject
of his own immediate experiences, as being one full of awfulness for
him, might be dropped.

"Apropos of your argument, I care very little, Hugh," said Julian,
"whether you make supernatural appearances objective or subjective. I
mean I don't care whether you regard the appearance as a mere deception
of the eye, wrought by the disordered workings of the brain, or as the
actual presence of a supernatural phenomenon. The result, the effect,
the _reality_ of the appearance is just the same in either case.
Whether the end is produced by an illusion of the senses, or an appeal
to them, the end _is_ produced, and the senses _are_ impressed by
something which is not in the ordinary course of human events, just as
powerfully as if the ghost had flesh and blood, or the voice were a
veritable pulsation of articulated air. The only thing that annoys me
is a contemp