There was in my childish mind another cause of suffering besides those I have mentioned, less acute, but more permanent and always unacknowledged. It was fear—fear of darkness and supernatural influences. As long as I can remember anything, I remember these horrors of my infancy. How they had been awakened I do not know; they were never revealed. I had heard other children ridiculed for such fears, and held my peace. At first these haunting, thrilling, stifling terrors were vague; afterwards the form varied; but one of the most permanent was the ghost in Hamlet. There was a volume of Shakspeare lying about, in which was an engraving I have not seen since, but it remains distinct in my mind as a picture. On one side stood Hamlet with his hair on end, literally “like quills upon the fretful porcupine,” and one hand with all the fingers outspread. On the other strided the ghost, encased in armour with nodding plumes; one finger pointing forwards, and all surrounded with a supernatural light. O that spectre! for three years it followed me up and down the dark staircase, or stood by my bed: only the blessed light had power to exorcise it. How it was that I knew, while I trembled and quaked, that it was unreal, never cried out, never expostulated, never confessed, I do not know. The figure of Apollyon looming over Christian, which I had found in an old edition of the “Pilgrim’s Progress,” was also a great torment. But worse, perhaps, were certain phantasms without shape, things like the vision in Job—“_A spirit passed before my face; it stood still, but I could not discern the form thereof_:”—and if not intelligible voices, there were strange unaccountable sounds filling the air around with a sort of mysterious life. In daylight I was not only fearless, but audacious, inclined to defy all power and brave all danger,—that is, all danger I could see. I remember volunteering to lead the way through a herd of cattle (among which was a dangerous bull, the terror of the neighbourhood) armed only with a little stick; but first I said the Lord’s Prayer fervently. In the ghastly night I never prayed; terror stifled prayer. These visionary sufferings, in some form or other, pursued me till I was nearly twelve years old. If I had not possessed a strong constitution and a strong understanding, which rejected and contemned my own fears, even while they shook me, I had been destroyed. How much weaker children suffer in this way, I have since known; and have known how to bring them help and strength, through sympathy and knowledge, the sympathy that soothes and does not encourage—the knowledge that dispels, and does not suggest, the evil.