maniac, and yet, by momentary transitions, grief, such as may be supposed
to possess the dying mother when leaving her infant children to the mercies
of the cruel. Usually, and perhaps always, in an unshaken nervous system,
these two modes of misery exclude each other--here first they met in horrid
reconciliation. There was also a separate peculiarity in the quality of the
horror. This was afterwards developed into far more revolting complexities
of misery and incomprehensible darkness; and perhaps I am wrong in
ascribing any value as a _causative_ agency to this particular case on the
Bath road--possibly it furnished merely an _occasion_ that accidentally
introduced a mode of horrors certain, to any rate, to have grown up,
with or without the Bath road, from more advanced stages of the nervous
derangement. Yet, as the cubs of tigers or leopards, when domesticated,
have been observed to suffer a sudden development of their latent ferocity
under too eager an appeal to their playfulness--the gaieties of sport in
_them_ being too closely connected with the fiery brightness of their
murderous instincts--so I have remarked that the caprices, the gay
arabesques, and the lovely floral luxuriations of dreams, betray a shocking
tendency to pass into finer maniacal splendors. That gaiety, for instance
(for such as first it was,) in the dreaming faculty, by which one principal
point of resemblance to a crocodile in the mail-coachman was soon made to
clothe him with the form of a crocodile, and yet was blended with accessory
circumstances derived from his _human_ functions, passed rapidly into a
further development, no longer gay or playful, but terrific, the most
terrific that besieges dreams, viz--the horrid inoculation upon each other
of incompatible natures. This horror has always been secretly felt by
man; it was felt even under pagan forms of religion, which offered a very
feeble, and also a very limited gamut for giving expression to the human
capacities of sublimity or of horror. We read it in the fearful composition
of the sphinx. The dragon, again, is the snake inoculated upon the
scorpion. The basilisk unites the mysterious malice of the evil eye,