the fiend who had enslaved me through the awful watches of the night;
and, harassed and nervous, I rose to the duties of the day.

I had--I can't say exactly why, but it may have been from the exquisite
anguish and profound impressions of unearthly horror, with which this
strange phantasmagoria was associated--an insurmountable antipathy to
describing the exact nature of my nightly troubles to my friend and
comrade. Generally, however, I told him that I was haunted by abominable
dreams; and, true to the imputed materialism of medicine, we put our
heads together to dispel my horrors, not by exorcism, but by a tonic.

I will do this tonic justice, and frankly admit that the accursed
portrait began to intermit its visits under its influence. What of that?
Was this singular apparition--as full of character as of
terror--therefore the creature of my fancy, or the invention of my poor
stomach? Was it, in short, _subjective_ (to borrow the technical slang
of the day) and not the palpable aggression and intrusion of an external
agent? That, good friend, as we will both admit, by no means follows.
The evil spirit, who enthralled my senses in the shape of that portrait,
may have been just as near me, just as energetic, just as malignant,
though I saw him not. What means the whole moral code of revealed
religion regarding the due keeping of our own bodies, soberness,
temperance, etc.? here is an obvious connexion between the material and
the invisible; the healthy tone of the system, and its unimpaired
energy, may, for aught we can tell, guard us against influences which
would otherwise render life itself terrific. The mesmerist and the
electro-biologist will fail upon an average with nine patients out of
ten--so may the evil spirit. Special conditions of the corporeal system
are indispensable to the production of certain spiritual phenomena. The
operation succeeds sometimes--sometimes fails--that is all.