Imo. I shake to hear him—
There is an awful thrilling in his voice,—
The soul of other days comes rushing in them.—
If nor my bounty nor my tears can aid thee,
Stranger, farewell; and ’mid thy misery
Pray, when thou tell’st thy beads, for one more wretched.
The omitted passages relative to Bertram’s dealing with the fiend of the forest are interesting for their novelty in Maturin. The supernatural element is here conceived in a manner quite alien to the Gothic Romance; it serves, in fact, to bring home a characteristic difference between the last-named movement and romanticism. It was the business of the ‘terrific’ school to trace the fear and horror aroused by unearthly apparitions in ordinary men; while in romantic poetry men of uncommon mould (like Byron’s Manfred) are, in consequence of their intercourse with spirits, made to grow still more distant from their neighbours and become themselves an object of awe in their unapproachable grandeur. Such is the case with Bertram after his visit to the demon, the description of which Scott found to be ‘executed in a grand and magnificent strain of poetry:’
—How tower’d his proud form through the shrouding gloom,
How spoke the eloquent silence of its motion,
How through the barred vizor did his accents