On the opposite side the valley, another hill lay parallel to mine; and
behind it, at some miles' distance, a great mountain. As often as, in my
hermit's cave, I lifted my eyes from the volume I was reading, I saw
this mountain before me. Very different was its character from that of
the hill on which I was seated. It was a mighty thing, a chieftain of
the race, seamed and scarred, featured with chasms and precipices and
over-leaning rocks, themselves huge as hills; here blackened with shade,
there overspread with glory; interlaced with the silvery lines of
falling streams, which, hurrying from heaven to earth, cared not how
they went, so it were downwards. Fearful stories were told of the gulfs,
sullen waters, and dizzy heights upon that terror-haunted mountain. In
storms the wind roared like thunder in its caverns and along the jagged
sides of its cliffs, but at other times that uplifted land-uplifted, yet
secret and full of dismay--lay silent as a cloud on the horizon.

I had a certain peculiarity of constitution, which I have some reason to
believe I inherit. It seems to have its root in an unusual delicacy of
hearing, which often conveys to me sounds inaudible to those about me.
This I have had many opportunities of proving. It has likewise, however,
brought me sounds which I could never trace back to their origin; though
they may have arisen from some natural operation which I had not
perseverance or mental acuteness sufficient to discover. From this, or,
it may be, from some deeper cause with which this is connected, arose a
certain kind of fearfulness associated with the sense of hearing, of
which I have never heard a corresponding instance. Full as my mind was
of the wild and sometimes fearful tales of a Highland nursery, fear
never entered my mind by the eyes, nor, when I brooded over tales of
terror, and fancied new and yet more frightful embodiments of horror,
did I shudder at any imaginable spectacle, or tremble lest the fancy