AND BODILY STATES UPON THE IMAGINATION. 57 



descriptions and pictures of history, poetry, or romance : Spencer's 

 Cave of Desj)air ; Dante's appalling picture, or Ugolino and his 

 famished offspring ; Laocoon and his sons, pressed in the folds, and 

 strangled with the pressure, of the mighty serpents ; the tortures of 

 Isaac Orobio, in the cells of the Spanish Inquisition, ;do not exceed, 

 and frequently do not equal, the agonies of the labourer under 

 nightmare. The state of mind and feeling at the time of the inva- 

 sion of night-mare, tends materially to increase or modify the scenes 

 and horrors which it produces: if we have been harassed by 

 care, depressed by grief; if we have been watching the sick- 

 bed of a parent, or mourn the loss of lover, friend, or wife, such 

 feelings or persons will mingle with the inexpressibly horrible na- 

 ture of these dreams. I remember the case of a gentleman who 

 experienced an attack of night-mare soon after the death of his wife, 

 produced by supping at a late hour of some unwholesome food. 

 She died soon after their marriage, the attachment preceding which 

 had been long and ardent. He imagined that she was restored to 

 him from the dead, and, like the Eurydice of Orpheus, was not 

 tainted by the damps or dishonours of the grave — the demon of 

 (corruption had not dared to lay a finger upon her sainted form, but 

 she was, to his imagination, gay and blooming as she first appeared 

 to him, a fair-haired girl, sporting among the flowers her hand had 

 planted, whose beauty was immeasurably inferior to her own : he 

 clasped the delightful vision to his bosom, and once more dwelt in 

 an elysium of earthly happiness which, alas ! was soon to be sha- 

 dowed by the phantoms of icy despair. Suddenly, by one of those 

 strange changes which are peculiar to the phenomena of our 

 dreams, he was stretched upon the bed, and the phantom of his de- 

 ceased wife seated upon his breast : her beauty began to fade, the 

 skin to peel and turn blue, the lip lost its vermilion, and the eye its 

 lustre, and he laboured in an agony of terror to throw from his body 

 the lifeless corse, which, with a weight like that of Ossa and Pelion, 

 appeared to be pressing him through the earth to her own clay 

 tenement. 



A lady, during a period of convalescence from alarming disease, 

 had an attack of night-mare. Her Imagination carried her to a 

 gloomy vault, fathoms below the surface of the earth. Here, 

 inclosed by walls of adamant, completely cut off" from the sights 

 and sounds of earth, she was incarcerated ; and so deep was her 

 living grave, that the mole and the earth-worm never descended 

 to its level : here she was to wrestle with death ; the phantom 

 assaulted her in shape of a skeleton, wound his bony arms round her 



