Then, by one of those common reactions from a period of overstrained
excitement, there succeeded to that sentiment of arrogance and daring with
which these wild, half-conscious invocations had been fostered and
sustained, a profound humility, a warning fear.

"What!" said I, inly, "have all those sound resolutions, which my reason
founded on the wise talk of Julius Faber, melted away in the wrack of
haggard, dissolving fancies! Is this my boasted intellect, my vaunted
science! I--I, Allen Fenwick, not only the credulous believer, but the
blundering practitioner, of an evil magic! Grant what may be possible,
however uncomprehended,--grant that in this accursed instrument of
antique superstition there be some real powers--chemical, magnetic, no
matter what-by which the imagination can be aroused, inflamed, deluded, so
that it shapes the things I have seen, speaks in the tones I have
heard,--grant this, shall I keep ever ready, at the caprice of will, a
constant tempter to steal away my reason and fool my senses? Or if, on
the other hand, I force my sense to admit what all sober men must reject;
if I unschool myself to believe that in what I have just experienced there
is no mental illusion; that sorcery is a fact, and a demon world has gates
which open to a key that a mortal can forge,--who but a saint would not
shrink from the practice of powers by which each passing thought of ill
might find in a fiend its abettor? In either case--in any case--while I
keep this direful relic of obsolete arts, I am haunted,--cheated out of my
senses, unfitted for the uses of life. If, as my ear or my fancy informs
me, grief--human grief--is about to befall me, shall I, in the sting of
impatient sorrow, have recourse to an aid which, the same voice declares,
will reduce me to a tool and a slave,--tool and slave to a being I dread
as a foe? Out on these nightmares! and away with the thing that bewitches
the brain to conceive them!"