Dr. Croly applies the Homeric prayer of Ajax to an incident in the long war with France, when twenty-seven thousand British were eager, under Abercrombie and the Duke of York, to attack the French lines, and at the first tap of the drum a general cheer was given from all the columns. But the day, we read, had scarcely broke when a dense fog fell suddenly upon the whole horizon, and rendered movement almost impossible. “Nothing could exceed the vexation of the army at this impediment, and if our soldiers had ever heard of Homer there would have been many a repetition of his warrior’s prayer, that ‘live or die, it might be in the light of day.’” One is reminded of the lines in Racine:— “Enfin toute l’horreur d’un combat ténébreux; Que pouvait la valeur dans ce trouble funeste?” It has been observed of a certain railway catastrophe, where the crash and collision occurred in a tunnel—in that very place which nobody, even on ordinary occasions, passes through without a slight shudder and an undefined dread of some such disaster as the one in question—that “Ajax’s prayer has been muttered by many who never heard of Ajax; and if we are to die, it is at least a mitigation of the hour of fate when it overtakes us in daylight.” In tracing, psychologically, the development within us of the sense of awe, Professor Newman attributes to the gloom of night (_deadly night_, as Homer terms it), more universally perhaps than to any other phenomenon, the first awakening of an uneasy sense of vastness. A young child, as he says, accustomed to survey the narrow limits of a lighted room, wakes in the night, and is frightened at the dim vacancy. “No nurse’s tales about spectres are needed to make the darkness awful.” Nor, he adds, is it from fear of any human or material enemy: it is the negation, the unknown, the unlimited, which excites and alarms; and sometimes the more if mingled with glimpses of light. The last words audible of Goethe were, “_More light!_” The final darkness grew apace, in the words of his ablest biographer; and he whose eternal longings had been for more light, gave a parting cry for it as he was passing under the shadow of death.