ited fragments of stained glass, once the pride
of monkish devotion. La Motte, thinking it possible it might yet shelter
some human being, advanced to the gate and lifted a massy knocker. The
hollow sounds rung through the emptiness of the place. After waiting a
few minutes, he forced back the gate, which was heavy with iron-work, and
creaked harshly on its hinges. . . From this chapel he passed into the
nave of the great church, of which one window, more perfect than the
rest, opened upon a long vista of the forest, through which was seen the
rich coloring of evening, melting by imperceptible gradations into the
solemn gray of upper air."

Mrs. Radcliffe never was in Italy or Switzerland or the south of France;
she divined the scenery of her romances from pictures and descriptions at
second hand. But she accompanied her husband in excursions to the Lakes
and other parts of England, and in 1794 made the tour of the Rhine.[25]
The passages in her diary, recording these travels, are much superior in
the truthfulness and local color of their nature sketching to anything in
her novels. Mrs. Radcliffe is furthermore to be credited with a certain
skill in producing terror, by the use of that favorite weapon in the
armory of the romanticists, mystery. If she did not invent a new
shudder, as Hugo said of Baudelaire, she gave at least a new turn to the
old-fashioned ghost story. She creates in her readers a feeling of
impending danger, suspense, foreboding. There is a sense of unearthly
presences in these vast, empty rooms; the silence itself is ominous;
echoes sound like footfalls, ghostly shadows lurk in dark corners,
whispers come from behind the arras, as it stirs in the gusts of
wind.[26] The heroine is afraid to look in the glass lest she should see
another face there beside her own; her lamp expires and leaves her in the
dark just as she is coming to the critical point in the manuscript which
she has found in an old chest, etc., etc., But the tale loses its
impressiveness as soon as it strays beyond the shade of the battlements.
The Gothic castle or priory is still, as in Walpole, the nucleus of the
story.

Two of these romances, the earliest and the latest, though they are the
weakest of the series, have a special interest for us as affording points
of comparison with the Waverly novels. "The Castles of Athlin and
Dunbayne" is the narrative of a feud between two Highland clans, and its
scene is the northeast