Temerity

“ Alternate hopes and fears distract my mind, My weary soul no rest can find. My busy fancy now presents A gracious scene: my son repents And God recalls his doom. Now to false shame he quits his fears, False courage takes, and madly dares His impious feast resume. Then arms and dying groans resound, And streams of blood gush out around. Alternate hopes and fears distract my mind, My weary soul no rest can find. ”

“ The absence of personal fear, the consciousness of security as great in the midst of pestilence and storm, as amidst beds of flowers on a summer morning, and the certainty that whatever appeared evil, or was assuredly painful, must eventually issue in a far greater and enduring good—this general feeling and conviction, I say, would gradually lull, and at last put to entire rest, the physical sensations of grief and fear; so that the man would look upon danger without dread,—accept pain without lamentation. ”

“ The gleams of calm that fall upon his tortured heart only light up an abyss of misery—a vault of darkness peopled by demons. He is already cut off from among the living, by the doom of inevitable fate, and while we pity him we fear him. ”

“ Terror, doubt, misery, had all rushed straightway to attack her heart, while the evils of which she had never dreamed stung mind and soul into dismay and horror, when, by hastily shutting the lid of the coffer, she tried to undo the evil she had done. ”

“ 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. ”

“ There came in answer the whimper of one too frightened to speak. Did you ever, as a child, Doctor, waken with the nightmare, afraid to cry out, afraid to move, tortured by the whimpers wrung out in reasonless terror? ”

“ Fear scares me from my sleep; and in the night I, like a troubled spirit, roam and try The strength of every bolt, and put to proof Each guard's fidelity:—I see, with fear, The dawning of each morn, which may confirm My apprehensions:—yet, thank God, there's hope That all my fears will soon be at an end ”

“ All the petty annoyances of life—a sudden fall, an unlucky [pg 103] word, a headache, a paltry quarrel—were set down to the agency of fiends; and all the fierce emotions that rend the mind—love, hate, jealousy, and madness—were equally the work of these invisible tormentors. Men and women stood in constant danger of them. ”

“ Great possibilities are lying dormant here: tempest and terror only await for the spirit that broods over the face of the waters to utter its command, and lo, the shore trembles with its assault. So dull, so apathetic, is the soul at times, to be roused by the breath of emotion to ungovernable discords. ”

“ What do you gain for all your worry? Rest and peace of mind? Alas, no! If the worry and effort accomplished anything, I would be the last to deprecate it, but observation and experience have taught me that the more you yield to these demons of vanity and worry, the more relentlessly they harry you. They veritably are demons that seize you by the throat and hang on like grim death until they suffocate and strangle you. ”

“ Only its impulses burst upon us from day to day and from century to century, making us weep from fear or regret, or faint with terror, or thrill wild with joy. Out of the deeps they come—the realms we do not know. ”

“ If he had considered these emergencies in the calm and security of his home, his hair would have crawled with terror at the thought of them. The imagination can conjure dreadful things; the heart and soul and body of man can endure catastrophes beyond imagining. ”

“ Surely some victim of woe
⁠Left it to bleach on the brink,
⁠Left it to plunge and to sink
Under the waters below.
Doubt, hesitation and fear,
⁠Madness, delusion, despair,
⁠All of them culminate there,
There by the swift rushing weir. ”

“ This mass of thoughts that crowd and elbow one another, this storm that tumbles its way over you, this unending dream that you have when you are awake, when your soul abandons itself to its natural, spontaneous impulses, there, indeed, is matter to terrify you! ”

“ I am conscious myself of a weight at my heart and a feeling of impending danger—ever-present danger, which is the more terrible because I am unable to define it.
And have I not cause for such a feeling? Consider the long sequence of incidents which have all pointed to some sinister influence which is at work around us. ”

“ How graphic the simile, "gnaw my inwards;" it is the perpetual symbol of worry; the poisonous mineral ever biting away the lining of the stomach; just as mice and rats gnaw at the backs of the most precious books and destroy them; aye, as they gnaw during the night-time and drive sleep away from the weary, so does suspicion gnaw with its sharp worrying teeth to the destruction of peace, happiness and joy. ”

“ Terror, frozen into despair, blighted hope, faith victorious even in death, have thrilled the hearts of thousands hard by the place where you stand, and which in a few hours will be ten feet under water. ”

“ What if they should tremble and quake, and be so taken up partly with sorrow and heaviness, partly with an earnest desire to be delivered from this danger of hell and damnation, as to weep, to lament, to mourn, and both with words and behaviour to shew themselves weary of life ”

“ We drank it in from the very atmosphere about us—a consuming passion, like that of jealousy—a haunting, exhausting spectre, which sits like a blight upon life. [172] Such a settled state of terror is one of the most awful of human phenomena. ”

“ I have the mania of persecution, a ceaseless, tormenting terror, but there are moments when I am seized by the thirst of life, and in those moments I fear to go out of my mind. I long to live ... terribly! ”

“ Others with pale face and quivering lip confessed the inward tumult, and that, if they feared naught for themselves, there were those at home, helpless and exposed, for whom the heart bled, and for whom it could not but show signs of fear. ”

“ The whisper overheard, the detected glance, the glare of malignity, ungrounded fears, suspicions, half-knowledge and mistakes, darken the brow and chill the heart of men. And accordingly it is natures not clear, not of quick and steady perceptions, but imperfect characters from which somewhat is hidden that all others see, who suffer most from these causes. In those persons who move the profoundest pity, tragedy seems to consist in temperament, not in events. ”

“ 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. ”

“ I have been more than once a victim to these crises and outbreaks which give us cause to believe that evil-meaning demons slip into us, to make us the ignorant accomplices of their most absurd desires. One morning I arose in a sullen mood, very sad, and tired of idleness, and thrust as it seemed to me to the doing of some great thing, some brilliant act—and then, alas, I opened the window. ”

“ Groping in intellectual darkness for a clew to his maze of doubt, his gaze, directed mechanically downward in the way of one who ponders momentous matters, fell upon something which, there, in the light of day and in the presence of living companions, affected him with terror. ”

“ 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. ”

“ For now, as ever, passionless and cold, Doth the dread angel of the future hold Evil and good before us, with no voice Or warning look to guide us in our choice; With spectral hands outreaching through the gloom The shadowy contrasts of the coming doom. ”

“ Even when painful and terrible in their subjects, "they are of power, by raising pity and fear or terror, to purge the mind of suchlike passions,—that is, to temper and reduce them to just measure with a kind of delight or, in the words of Charles Lamb, "they dispose the mind to a meditative tenderness." ”

“ Even those who had been controlled by the most abject emotions while the terrors of the night lasted, when morning came, stood up boldly for a common sense solution of the mystery. Those who had all their lives been troubled with superstitious fears, and were in danger of becoming imbued with the error in its grosser forms, by the aid of such experiences as that through which they had recently passed, admitted the possibility of this. ”

“ Any visible fact would be better than this impending horror of the imagination—this silent dread so much worse than any reality of failure—which encompassed them with the impalpable thickness and darkness of a cloud. ”

“ For a moment fear, fear that made him shudder and clasp his covers with his hands, conquered him, and he realised the terror of trouble between members of this little company, so few and so weak even if united and in harmony. ”

“ Let us then frankly recognise the physical element in these irrational terrors; and when one has once done this, a great burden is taken off the mind, because one sees that such fear may be a real illusion, a sort of ghastly mockery, which by directly affecting the delicate machinery through which emotion is translated into act, may produce a symptom of terror which is both causeless and baseless, and which may imply neither a lack of courage nor self-control. ”

“ Thus vast multitudes are reduced to want, to despair, and rendered a prey to grief, terror, and every depressing passion of the human mind; they are exposed to every inclemency of the weather; to the scorching heats of the day, and the chilling damps of the night ”

“ If I quake, what matters it what I quake at? Our proper vice takes form in one or another shape, according to the sex, age, or temperament of the person, and, if we are capable of fear, will readily find terrors. ”

“ Such a heart is, at least to the limited ken of others, a chaos,—but a chaos from which he who imbosoms it, and who alone can understand it, calls up,—less like a god than a demon,—the evil elements, which create the lurid sphere his greatness. ”

“ In the agony of terror, their chains in the hold;
(What now makes them tame, is what then made them bold;)
Who crouch, side by side, and have driven, like a crank,
The deep grip of their claws through the vibrating plank. ”

“ Thou hast hurled them down to destruction. How are they become a desolation in a moment! They are utterly consumed with terrors. As a nightmare when one awaketh, so, O Lord, when Thou awakest Thou dost despise [flout] the presentment of them."
Then there is the next step, the perception of his own stupidity: "My mind was in a ferment, and I was pricked in my heart. ”

“ What! the more the danger alarms you, the more it should render you indolent and careless! The excessive and improper terrors of your imagination should cure you, even of that prudent dread which operates your salvation ”

“ For hours we lay thus in all the intensity of an inner storm and stress, which it seemed could not fail to develop us, to mould us, to age us, to leave on us its scars, to bequeath us its peace or remorse or despair, as would some great mysterious dark experience direct from the sources of life. ”

“ But, poor soul! even as he insists, the agony within rises, breaks up, overwhelms the picture. He lives again through the jars and frets of those few burning days, the growing mistrust of them, the sense of jealous terror and insecurity—and then through the anguish of desertion and loss. ”

“ To mention the icy chill at the back-bone, the sudden sinewless trembling of the knees, the withering dryness of throat and tongue, is to be commonplace; and terror is not commonplace. Perhaps to remember terror is to know again the helplessness and faintness it brings. ”

“ Then you would rebel and raise your thoughts to the God of your heart and your aspirations, and conquer the mysterious terror which the place inspires, but you cannot: the Escurial surrounds, holds, and crushes you ”

“ Such tools the Tempter ever needs,
To do the savagest of deeds;
For them no vision'd terrors daunt,
425Their nights no fancied spectres haunt,
One fear with them, of all most base,
The fear of death,—alone finds place. ”

“ But the sudden and violent change in your whole disposition, has proved only too plainly, that some concealed and unfortunate event—some mysterious adventure, at which we cannot guess, is the cause of your melancholy; which cause, however remote, still continues to exercise over you the same destructive influence. ”

“ Who can tell the countless temptations to evil which flow in from a neglected, disordered, deranged nervous system,—temptations to anger, to irritability, to selfishness, to every kind of sin of appetite and passion? ”

“ They mark time in my spirit's flawed action. I begin each day with a Damn of sorts. I end each day with a Damn of sorts. At midday sometimes it's, 'Damn the terrifying ignorance of people.' In the dusk a deep-felt Damn of the blood. ”

“ All they that know thee among the people shall be astonished at thee: thou shalt be a terror, and never shalt thou be any more.—All shall marvel at thy destruction; thou shall become wasted, devastated (a terror) , and never shalt thou exist any more. ”