Dread

“ Dread is the agony and fell the throes
Which with the Night and Storm he undergoes,
While Treason in his robes herself attires,
And Love beneath adultery's sheet expires,
And mocked Sincerity sincerer grows. ”

“ Slowly their dread mastered them; their faces grew grey and then green; one man gave back a step, then another; one by one they tore away their eyes from the dormant horror; glared at one another in the agony of utter fear; turned with one accord, and fled—fled as men flee with the fear of death at their backs, and the devils of the lone Night and the waste on their heels. ”

“ So dark and deep a dread coiled round the man, as he contemplated it, that he sought to drape the dreadfulness in some kind of thin, transparent veil, and to put the buffer of a word between him and its hideousness. ”

“ I experienced the overwhelming dread that one has in presence of things supernatural, in presence of irreparable disaster. My boyish head whirled round and soared. I began to cry with all my might, without knowing why, a prey to terror, to grief, to a dreadful bewilderment. ”

“ A great love and a great dread had seized upon me at once. A great love for the man by whose face I had been moved for weeks and a great dread—well, I cannot explain my dread, not as I felt it that night. It was formless and without apparent foundation; but it would no more leave me than my uneasy memory of the fierce instinct which had led him at such a critical instant to close his door against all help, though in so doing he had subjected a young girl to many minutes of intense embarrassment and mortifying indecision. ”

“ Mere mocks of human that do play a part, Are but behind the mask a living death, A muffled night that murmurs of the light, A dread despair where lips have muttered hope.
Still fared we north across that frozen waste Of icy horror ringed with awful night, To seek the living in a world of death; And as we fared a terror grew and grew About my heart like madness, till I dreamed A vague desire to flee by night and creep, By steel-blue, windless plain and haunted wood, And wizened shore and headland, once more south. ”

“ He heard the chuckling laugh of the old councilor—and then an incoherent raving that set his blood tingling. There is a horror in the sound of madness, a horror that creeps to the very pit of one's soul, that sends shivering dread from every nerve center, that causes one who is alone with it to sweat with a nameless fear. ”

“ And looked her and death in the face, And knew me unworthy and base, And the shores where the black waters ran;—
They come to the outer shore and look each on each through the mists, and read the ancient curse there,
When we came to that lone, outer shore, Where the world sundered, parting us two; (God and the dread nevermore!) When we came where the thick mists blew, So face could scarce on face, through, Read the woe-rune of earth’s ancient lore;—
and feel the dread agony of parting. Their souls feel for one another as the seas for the land. ”

“ We were in dread. Our horror was at its height, circulation had stopped, all nervous influence was annihilated, and we were covered with cold sweat, like a sweat of agony! And what noise around our frail bark! ”

“ Bitter words of strife it teacheth,
Striketh kind affections dead;
Even beyond the grave it reacheth,
To the judgment-bar of dread.
Have we any room to doubt it,
When its evil fruits we see? ”

“ A most unconquerable dread came upon her, that even admitting that the stranger was doing all he could to inform her friends of her unhappy situation, her senses would be undermined before they could come to her relief, and, as time wore on, and hope grew fainter and duller, she began to yield herself up to despair, which gradually threw its damp and suffocating clouds over her soul. ”

“ Dread, my brethren, lest we prepare for our posterity the same calamities, in imitating the disorders of those who have preceded us. Dread, lest an irritated God should one day abandon these temples which we profane, and lest they, in their turn, become the asylum of error. ”

“ There is indeed in mind that heat it gets When seething in rage, and flashes from the eyes More swiftly fire; there is, again, that wind, Much, and so cold, companion of all dread, Which rouses the shudder in the shaken frame; There is no less that state of air composed, Making the tranquil breast, the serene face. But more of hot have they whose restive hearts, Whose minds of passion quickly seethe in rage— Of which kind chief are fierce abounding lions, Who often with roaring burst the breast o'erwrought, Unable to hold the surging wrath within ”

“ Without warning, an inexplicable terror would fall upon her; like the weakest child, she craved protection from a dread inspired solely by her imagination, and solace for an anguish of wretchedness to which she could give no form in words. ”

“ Fear leap in a babe's face, and take his breath,
⁠Fear, like the fear of eld
That knows the price of life, the name of death.
⁠What is it justifies
This thing, this dread, this fright that has no tongue,
⁠The terror in those eyes
When only eyes can speak—they are so young? ”

“ For here, apart, dwells one whose hands have wrought
Strange eidola that chill the world with fear;
Whose graven runes in tones of dread have taught
What things beyond the star-gulfs lurk and leer. ”

“ Here all may sleep, for no dread warder’s warning Can come with clang of care and garish day; They sleep the sleep of night that knows no morning, No fierce noon-heats or chill at evening grey; No sound of those who watch or weep or pray [Pg 185] May enter here to stir the long, long rest Of those who slumber on oblivion’s breast. ”

“ Then life ebbed lower in the bravest heart, And spake the leader, “If in ten more days We chance on nothing, then will we return, And set our faces once more to the south.” For that dread land began to close us in, With cold and hunger, bit at our poor limbs, Till life grew there a feeble, flickering flame, Amid the snows and ice-floes of that land. Then ten days crept out shrunk and grey and wan, With nothing but the lonely, haunted waste. ”

“ At the dread thought, that here its life’s-blood soon
Now warm in life and feeling, mingle soon
With the cold clod? a thought most horrible!
So only dreadful, for reality
Is none of suffering here; here all is peace;
No nerve will throb to anguish in the grave.
Dreadful it is to think of losing life;
But having lost, knowledge of loss is not,
Therefore no ill. Haste, Maiden, to repose;
Probe deep the seat of life. ”

“ Affliction, a grief that harasses the body. Despair, a grief that excludes all hope of better things to come. But those feelings which are included under fear, they define thus: There is sloth, which is a dread of some ensuing labor; shame and terror, which affect the body—hence blushing attends shame; a paleness, and tremor, and chattering of the teeth attend terror—cowardice, which is an apprehension of some approaching evil; dread, a fear that unhinges the mind, whence comes that line of Ennius,
Then dread discharged all wisdom from my mind ”

“ Fearing death as I did life, burdened with a nameless dread yet unwilling to leave the scenes evoking it, I awaited whatever consummating horror was shifting itself in the immense region beyond the walls of consciousness. ”

“ It was fear, rather than anger that sounded in their voices, the deadly terror of that unconquerable enemy, free-thinking, so often beaten down but always raising its head again. Men looked at each other with dread and suspicion in their eyes. ”

“ Indeed, no pen can express the terror that filled the hearts of these brave and hardy men at the thought of being thus entombed in a living grave; they quailed not when meeting death face to face, but shrank in dread at the slowly advancing foe. ”

“ My heart palpitated in the sickness of fear, and I hurried on with irregular steps, not daring to look about me:
Like one who, on a lonely road,
Doth walk in fear and dread,
And, having once turned round, walks on,
And turns no more his head;
Because he knows a frightful fiend
Doth close behind him tread. ”

“ My dread is not from fear of the physical pain of hanging, for, after all, the life of every man and every woman ends in a strangle. It is that these men will lay their hands on me and bind me with a rope and that I may not forbid them. ”

“ Not ordinary fear of insult, injury or death, but abject, quivering dread of something that you cannot see—fear that dries the inside of the mouth and half of the throat—fear that makes you sweat on the palms of the hands, and gulp in order to keep the uvula at work? This is a fine Fear—a great cowardice, and must be felt to be appreciated. The very improbability of billiards in a dâk-bungalow proved the reality of the thing. No man—drunk or sober—could imagine a game at billiards, or invent the spitting crack of a “screw-cannon.” ”

“ There shall he terrible signs in the heavens and in all the elements. These and their causes I shall explain in the first part. These signs shall be to the wicked a source of fear, anguish, and dread; but to the good a source of joy and exultation. This I shall show in the second part. Sinners! if you wish that the last day should not he a cause of dread to you, be converted! ”

“ The mind sickens, and sinks under the oppression of its own feelings. What then must be the dread reality! From some of the spectators we learn that it was a scene which transfixed in breathless horror almost every one who witnessed it. ”

“ Then there arises up another object of dread, which, in like manner, derives all its power to terrify and to hurt from the fact of our discordance with God; and that is 'the shadow feared of man,' that stands shrouded by the path, and waits for each of us. ”

“ In it we behold the type of the horrible, without anything to relieve the unpleasant impression. The positive, though distant, resemblance to the human form itself, instead of making the creature more seemly, only intensities the feeling of dread with which we behold it. ”

“ In the old, feudal days of quick-spilled blood and easy death, there was a certain fateful, epoch-making cry which had power to carry dread or terror through the high ranks of the official world, while it brought to others exultant hopes of desires and ambitions at last to be fulfilled. ”

“ And her dread diary with horror fills. ”

“ The shrinking dread which those feel who, like myself and the author of the story to which I have previously alluded, have been brought into undesired and undesirable communion with things supernatural, is a sensation which time can never lessen nor efface. I am fifty-eight years old, an honest, God-fearing man, ashamed to look no man in the face, and conscious of no wrong-doing ”

“ The Spectator on Dreads.—There might be a tendency to think that these curious dreads came only as the result of the individualistic over-occupation with self and the introspective sophistication of the modern time, but the dread is not confined to our time nor special to it in any way, for we find Shakespeare talking of those who cannot bear a harmless, necessary cat. ”

“ The dread of the departed spirits of the dead brought to light a new and amazing form of fear, an appalling and powerful terror, which contributed to whipping the loose social orders of early ages into the more thoroughly disciplined and better controlled primitive groups of ancient times. ”

“ BUT in this I stood beholding things general, troublously and mourning, saying thus to our Lord in my meaning, with full great dread: Ah! good Lord, how might all be well, for the great hurt that is come, by sin, to the creature? And here I desired, as far as I durst, to have some more open declaring wherewith I might be eased in this matter. ”

“ A general dread, that cannot be analyzed or accounted for, is perhaps more keenly felt than any other. Persons who have never spoken sometimes make light of it, but no one will ever do so who has experienced it. ”

“ The element of dread undoubtedly comes into play early. The awe which we feel in the presence of death, or in passing in the dark through a churchyard, takes in the savage the form of terror. The [Pg 214] behaviour of the ghost in dreams, its ability to do what men still in the flesh cannot do, quicken the belief in occult power, and the desire to propitiate it. ”

“ Nevertheless, the continual state of dread adds a great deal to the pleasure of the traveller, for it keeps you continually on the alert, and hinders the time from hanging heavily on your hands; you do some heroic actions, you display a superhuman amount of valour, and the troubled and scared looks of those who are spared raises you in your own estimation. ”

“ There are sources of terror which, though they may impend no peril to the person, will affect the spirit of the most resolute, and involve the liveliest faculties in fright and consternation. Yet, whether it is that we are sustained by despair, or that those superior and invisible intelligences, which some believe to attend upon us, like ministering angels, from the cradle to the grave, lend the soul a new influence, this extreme of dread generally finds the mind self-possessed, and the senses more than ever active. ”

“ The dread relates to the child's mother, and later to other familiar persons, and it is the expression of an unfulfilled desire, which the child does not yet know how to deal with in any way except by turning it into dread. ”

“ By the light of the fire curling its smoke upward through the central opening in the roof, it was interesting to note the faces of our hosts. We had never met a people of a more peaceful temperament, and, on the other hand, none more easily frightened. A dread of the evil eye is one of their characteristics. ”