We may seem to have strayed from the proper boundaries in going so far.
But it is one of the offices of this book to widen the area of research,
and relate the ghost-story anew to the whole literature of wonder and
imagination. Such sagas as that which Dr Douglas Hyde has translated
with consummate art from the Irish, "Teig O'Kane and the Corpse," which
Mr W.B. Yeats called a little masterpiece; or Boccaccio's story of the
spectre-hounds that pulled down the daughter of Anastasio, or Scott's
"Wandering Willie's Tale," or Hawker's "Cruel Coppinger," or Edgar Poe's
"Fall of the House of Usher," are of their kind not to be beaten. And in
their own way some of the later records are as telling. One can take the
book as a text-book of the supernatural, or as a story-book of that
middle world which has given us the ghosts that Homer and Shakespeare
conjured up.

ERNEST RHYS.




I

GHOST STORIES FROM LITERARY SOURCES




I

THE FALL OF THE HOUSE OF USHER