V
One of the greatest physiologists of fear was Edgar Allan Poe, the unhappy poet who lived in morbid hallucinations, and died at the age of thirty-seven in a hospital, a victim to intemperance, amidst the horrors and convulsions of delirium tremens.
No one has ever described fear more minutely, none have so ruthlessly analysed, or made us feel with more intensity, the pain of overwhelming emotions—the throbbing which seems to burst the heart and crush the soul, the suffocating oppression, the awful agony of him who awaits death. No one ever plunged the mind of man into more horrible abysses, or led it into darker, gloomier wildernesses. None have ever inspired such horror with storm, tempest, the phosphorescence of decay, the lightning-flashes in the dead of night, the sighs and moans losing themselves in the darkness, the grip of fleshless hands amid the mystery of graves and ruins.
Who can forget those midnight terrors, those streaks of lurid light, those faint footfalls in the dark which make us shudder, those murders which paralyse the limbs, the groans, the strangled cries from the depths of a soul in agony? And those pulsations of the heart, deep, rapid, restrained, sending forth, like a muffled bell, a dull sound which spreads in the silence of the night, beating, throbbing even after death? How useless becomes even the courage of despair before these motionless spectres which fill us with terror! And the tortures and horrors for which words fail us, which still the heart, close the staring eye and numb the trembling limbs, stretch us senseless on this rack of fright and kill us with agony!