Of course the child, oppressed by the strangeness of Gothic forms, is yet incapable of analyzing the impression received: he is frightened without comprehending. He cannot divine that the points and the curves are terrible to him because they represent the prodigious exaggeration of a real law of vegetal growth. He dreads the shapes because they seem alive; yet he does not know how to express this dread. Without suspecting why, he feels that this silent manifestation of power, everywhere pointing and piercing upward, is not natural. To his startled imagination, the building stretches itself like a phantasm of sleep,—makes itself tall and taller with intent to frighten. Even though built by hands of men, it has ceased to be a mass of dead stone: it is infused with Something that thinks and threatens;—it has become a shadowing malevolence, a multiple goblinry, a monstrous fetish!
Levitation
Levitation
OUT of some upper-story window I was looking into a street of yellow-tinted houses,—a colonial street, old-fashioned, narrow, with palm-heads showing above its roofs of tile. There were no shadows; there was no sun,—only a grey soft light, as of early gloaming.
Suddenly I found myself falling from the window; and my heart gave one sickening leap of terror. But the distance from window to pavement proved to be much greater than I supposed,—so great that, in spite of my fear, I began to wonder. Still I kept falling, falling,—and still the dreaded shock did not come. Then the fear ceased, and a queer pleasure took its place;—for I discovered that I was not falling quickly, but only floating down. Moreover, I was floating feet foremost—must have turned in descending. At last I touched the stones—but very, very lightly, with only one foot; and instantly at that touch I went up again,—rose to the level of the eaves. People stopped to stare at me. I felt the exultation of power superhuman;—I felt for the moment as a god.