Horror

“ And the horror grows darker with their fancies, the cold of early morning, the comfortless grey of the dawn, the dead white mist, the ever-dripping tears of the dew, the deluging rains, the appalling thunder-bursts. ”

“ A thousand times—flung off their weight with thee?
Since when has death grown fearful; with whose face,
As with familiar images of life,
Thou hast been wont to live; what ails thee, Sleep!
A natural horror sinks my shuddering soul. ”

“ Gradually this first sense of utter and unspeakable loss changed into a startled consciousness of fear;—some awful transformation of things familiar was about to be consummated;—and he felt the distinct approach of some unnameable Horror which was about to convulse and overwhelm all mankind. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Gradually, however, the dark truth came out, and orbed itself into that blood-red unity of horror, which has since made the firmest nerves to tremble, and the stoutest knees to shake, which has haunted dreams, inspired poetry, created new and ghastly shapes of superstition, and which, even yet, as the solitary traveller is plodding his way amidst the shadows of an autumn evening, or under the shivering stars of a winter night, can drench the skin and curdle the blood. ”

“ The horror of the thing, objective and subjective, is always present to my mind; the horror of creeping things, a superstitious horror of the void and the powers about me, the horror of my own devastation and continual murders. The life of the plants comes through my finger-tips, their struggles go to my heart like supplications. ”

“ And with this recollection, the old, never fully vanquished horror of life has again awakened in her, that terrible, all-consuming, all-degrading horror which must forever exclude her from every sweet, unconscious, surrendering inclination of the heart. ”

“ It stopped in midair as the laughter ceased, and a loathsome sucking noise took its place. With a new and accelerated horror, I realized that that blood was being drained to feed the invisible entity from beyond! ”

“ Amid all this horror, the sight of ghastly death, and the ravings of delirium, whilst some brave souls devoted themselves to the assistance of the suffering and dying, crowds of others rushed to taverns, theatres, and places of debauch, and a strange maniacal mirth startled the silence of the night, and added horror to the work of death. ”

“ Let him alone with the night, and the night will give him such a tangled and convulsed spasm of horror as will make his very soul shriek aloud for two almost impossible things, yet awhile, death or the Lord’s pardon. ”

“ I'll admit that there is this atmosphere--this--er--inexplicable horror in the house and grounds, and that if not of damnation exactly, it is certainly damnable. I'm not too prejudiced to deny that, for I've felt it myself. ”

“ Over the trampled corn, and the broken trees, and the horror,—
Horror of soulless pain of the beasts that perish unknowing,
Horror of human ruin, the shattered sheaths of the spirit,
Horror men pray to forget, and the tongue refuses to tell it,—
Now was the taintless light of the large moon shed out of heaven, [Pg 29]
Glory unchanged as the Face of the Father of Lights, to whom upward
Gropes the groaning world. ”

“ I lay for a few moments simply imbruted with terror; when another cloud, obscuring the moon, delivered me from the immediately paralysing effects of the presence to the vision of the object of horror, while it added the force of imagination to the power of fear within me ”

“ There was a feeling of horror, a kind of bristling in the darkness, and a sense of blood. They lay with their hearts in the grip of an intense anguish. The wind came through the tree fiercer and fiercer. ”

“ The hints of horror seize your ear;
⁠While gleams of lost delight
Raise the deep discord of the brain,
As light'ning shines along the main
⁠Thro' whirlwinds and thro' night.
No more can faith or candor move ”

“ Like a hideous and implacable engine of death the eyes of the unknown Horror swelled and expanded until they were close before me, enormous, terrible, and I felt a slow, cold, wet breath propelled with mechanical regularity against my face, enveloping me in its fetid mist, in its charnel-house deadliness.
With ordinary fear goes always a physical terror, but with me in the presence of this unspeakable Thing was only the utter and awful terror of the mind, the mad fear of a prolonged and ghostly nightmare. ”

“ The agitation of the horror at his heart, ever working and constantly repressed, shows through the veil, and gives an excited uncertainty to his words, and a wild vacillation to his manner and behaviour. ”

“ But what a volume of dull, squalid horror—a horror of great darkness gradually obscuring all the light of day from the life of the sufferer might be written from the simple prosaic experiences of the ragged fellows whom you meet every day in the street. ”

“ Soul, mind and body were in revolt to-night. Even faith, the simple faith in God that she had known since childhood, was wavering. There seemed nothing but horror around her, a mental horror, a physical horror ”

“ The great criticism to which all modern tragedy, and a great deal of modern drama, are open is the undue and illegitimate use of horror. Horror is not terror. They are two entirely distinct affections. A man hurled from a desperate precipice, in the living act to fall, is properly an object of terror, sudden and quaking. ”

“ And now, when I am settling down to these reminiscences in late middle age, the most dreadful waking sense of real horror, and the first real touch of human pity, seem to meet each other, and to blend. ”

“ He felt the fascination and repulsion of its impenetrable mystery, of its stark and desolate wastes, whose spell is yet so potent in the imagination of man, that many have found in its barren horror the very heart of beauty. ”

“ To know the horror of blood forever upon one's hands, to rise, cold-sweated, in the night, fearful of the very shadows around one, to live with every detail of that fearsome act sweeping like some dread spectre at unexpected moments upon the consciousness! ”

“ I might boast that during all this scene of horror not a sigh or expression of fear escaped from me, had not my support been found in that miserable, though strong, consolation, that all mankind were involved in the same calamity, and that I imagined I was perishing with the world itself. ”

“ The elements of horror are as many and varied as the threads in a Gobelin tapestry—with special stimuli for each of us. Perhaps terror lies in the howl of a coyote, in the noises of an old house, in a blaze of fire. Or perhaps it responds to the mournful creak of wheels on a gravel road, to moonlight reflected from a huge old mirror. ”

“ Mutter'd to wretch by necromantic spell;
Or of those hags, who at the witching time
Of murky midnight ride the air sublime,
And mingle foul embrace with fiends of Hell;
Cold Horror drinks it's blood! ”

“ In order that we should experience horror, something more is needed than the excitation of the soul, something more than the spectacle of the dreadful death; there must be a shuddering sense of mystery or a sensation of abnormal terror beyond the limits of nature. ”

“ He knew the horror that had forced the appeal from her—the terror which can change a man's heart to water—the horror of those pitiless trampling feet—of those mad mob rushes under which a human body can be stamped out of recognition. ”

“ May all the members of my body be tortured with inconceivable agony, and all the powers of my soul tormented with horror and despair, inexpressible and eternal! Let my dwelling be in the blackness of darkness, and my companions accursed men and accursed devils! ”

“ A faint breeze stirred the chain, and that which was appended to it swayed gently to and fro.
It was altogether an object to inspire indescribable dread. Horror, which disproportions everything, increased its dimensions, without changing its shape. It was a condensation of darkness into a definite form. Twilight and moon-rise, stars setting behind the cliff, the clouds and winds, seemed to have entered into the composition of this visible nonentity. ”

“ It is absolutely impossible to give even a faint idea of the horror, the agony, the heart-rending terror that harrowed up his soul, whenever the thought of death flashed across his mind. He received me with phrensied ardour, in which hope and fear were strongly depicted. ”

“ I was on the brink of the abyss, I almost perished. What cruel temptations fate is sending me! Fools, we smile, without suspecting anything, when some murderous hand is already lifted to attack us; we smile, and the very next instant we open our eyes wide with horror. ”

“ I would not, for the sake of thrilling you with horror, invent so terrible a scene. It was witnessed. It is true; true as that accursed sin which has rendered the human heart capable of such diabolical enormities! ”

“ Death took features altogether new to him, in these rich and sensuous surroundings. Nature enjoyed it, played with it, the horror added to her charm, she liked the torture, and smothered her victim with caresses. ”

“ But once the full horror comes to light, it simply overwhelms us. We see at once that the leisurely start was intended to lull us a little. Certainly it kept us interested enough to continue, and we did perhaps expect some pretty formidable horrors--but nothing like what we finally encounter! ”

“ I wondered whether I should ever reach the world again, and at times would furtively open my eyes to see if I could discern any feature of the place other than the wind of spiced putrefaction, the topless columns, and the thaumatropically grotesque shadows of abnormal horror. ”

“ Yet there it always lurked—something for ever dimly seen, but ever there, and never absent for a moment. It was the faintest, palest shadow of some look, to which an instant of intense and most unutterable horror only could have given birth ”

“ And when he stands before her, and all nature looks on in breathless horror, while his vacant eye wanders hopelessly through the gloom of futurity, and seeks God, but finds him nowhere, and then returns disappointed and despairing! ”

“ 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, then the pain—the infinity of feeling—
Words fail to paint its anguish. Reason, reeling,
Staggered with torture through his burning brain,
While his teeth gnashed with bitterness and pain;
Reflection grew a scorpion, speech had fled,
And all but madness and despair were dead.
XXI. He slept to dream of death, or worse than death;
For death were bliss, and the convulsive wrath
Of living torture peace, to the dread weight
That pressed upon sensation, while the light
Of reason gleamed but horror, and strange hosts
Of hideous phantasies, like threatening ghosts. ”

“ But the love of horror respecting which we are now inquiring appears to be an unnatural and feeble feeling; it is not that the person needs excitement, or has any such strong perceptions as would cause excitement, but he is dead to the horror, and a strange evil influence guides his feebleness of mind rather to fearful images than to beautiful ones,—as our disturbed dreams are sometimes filled with ghastliness which seem not to arise out of any conceivable association of our waking ideas, but to be a vapor out of the very chambers of the tomb, to which the mind, in its palsy, has approached. ”

“ The mind is filled with horror at the supreme desolation that pervades the whole scene. It is small wonder that the pen cannot in the hands of the most skillful even pretend to convey one-hundredth part of what is seen and heard every hour in the day in this fearful place. ”

“ Thoughts thus crossing each other haphazard, as in the nightmare of a vision, growing up into phantom sights and sounds, and all serving to create horror, not because those sights and sounds are really visitations from a world without, but that they are ghastly monstrous renewals of what have been in this world itself, set into malignant play by a malignant mortal. ”

“ Do you know the horrible, leaden, choking pain that leaps up and takes you by the throat, strangling you in a very fog of horror, when, suddenly, swiftly, in the midst of light and laughter, the Great Shadow falls between you 222and one at your very side? ”

“ The picture, when we dwell long enough upon its details, emerges into prominence, moreover, as indubitably awe-inspiring, terrifying, dreadful in its poignant expression of wrath, retaliation, thirst for vengeance, cruelty, and helpless horror. ”