Next, the happy believers in the supernatural owed to their simplicity delicious throbs of fear,--not craven cowardice, but that more refined and complex feeling, which is of all sensations the most enthralling, the most elusive, and the most impossible to define. Fear, like all other treacherous gifts, must be handled with discrimination: a thought too much, and we are brutalized and degraded; but within certain limits it enhances all the pleasures of life. When Captain Forsyth stood behind a tree on a sultry summer morning, and saw the tigress step softly through the long jungle grass, and the affrighted monkeys swing chattering overhead, there must have come upon him that sensation of awe which alone makes courage possible.[2] He knew that his life hung trembling in the balance, and that all depended upon the first shot he fired. He respected, as a sane man would, the mighty strength of his antagonist, her graceful limbs instinct with power, her cruel eyes blinking in the yellow dawn. And born of the fear, which stirred but could not conquer him, came the keen transport of the hunter, who feels that one such supremely heroic moment is worth a year of ordinary life. Without that dread, not only would the joy be lessened, and the glad rebound from danger to a sense of safety lost forever, but the disciplined and manly courage of the English soldier would degenerate into a mere brutish audacity, hardly above the level of the beast he slays. In children, this delicate emotion of fear, growing out of their dependent condition, gives dignity and meaning to their courage when they are brave, and a delicious zest to their youthful delinquencies. Gray, in his chilly and melancholy manhood, years after he has resigned himself to never again being “either dirty or amused” as long as he lives, goes back like a flash to the unlawful delight of a schoolboy’s stolen freedom:-- “Still as they run they look behind, They hear a voice in every wind, And snatch a fearful joy.”