--Names, whose sense we see not, Fray us with things that be not? Is it that we naturally conceive terror from such objects, considered in their capacity of being able to inflict upon us bodily injury?--O, least of all! These terrors are of older standing. They date beyond body--or, without the body, they would have been the same. All the cruel, tormenting, defined devils in Dante--tearing, mangling, choking, stifling, scorching demons--are they one half so fearful to the spirit of a man, as the simple idea of a spirit unembodied following him-- Like one that on a lonesome road Doth walk in fear and dread, And having once turn'd round, walks on, And turns no more his head; Because he knows a frightful fiend Doth close behind him tread.[1] That the kind of fear here treated of is purely spiritual--that it is strong in proportion as it is objectless upon earth--that it predominates in the period of sinless infancy--are difficulties, the solution of which might afford some probable insight into our antemundane condition, and a peep at least into the shadow-land of pre-existence. My night-fancies have long ceased to be afflictive. I confess an occasional night-mare; but I do not, as in early youth, keep a stud of them. Fiendish faces, with the extinguished taper, will come and look at me; but I know them for mockeries, even while I cannot elude their presence, and I fight and grapple with them. For the credit of my imagination, I am almost ashamed to say how tame and prosaic my dreams are grown. They are never romantic, seldom even rural. They are of architecture and of buildings--cities abroad, which I have never seen, and hardly have hope to see. I have traversed, for the seeming length of a natural day, Rome, Amsterdam, Paris, Lisbon--their churches, palaces, squares, market-places, shops, suburbs, ruins, with an inexpressible sense of delight--a map-like distinctness of trace--and a day-light vividness of vision, that was all but being awake.--I have formerly travelled among the Westmoreland fells--my highest Alps,--but they are objects too mighty for the grasp of my dreaming recognition; and I have again and again awoke with ineffectual struggles of the inner eye, to make out a shape in any way whatever, of Helvellyn. Methought I was in that country, but the mountains were gone. The poverty of my dreams mortifies me. There is Coleridge, at his will can conjure up icy domes, and pleasure-houses for Kubla Khan, and Abyssinian maids, and songs of Abara, and caverns, Where Alph, the sacred river, runs,