I saw the features as
distinctly as if the meridian sun had beamed upon
them... It was by degrees that the features showed
themselves thus out of what had been a formless shadow.
I gazed upon it intently. Presently it faded away by as
insensible degrees as those by which it had become
agonisingly clear. After a short time it returned."
Godwin describes a ghost as deliberately and exactly as he would
describe a house, and his delineation causes not the faintest
tremor. Having little imagination himself, he leaves nothing to
the imagination of the reader. In his _Lives of the
Necromancers_, he shows that he is interested in discovering the
origin of a belief in natural magic; but the life stories of the
magicians suggest no romantic pictures to his imagination. In
dealing with the mysterious and the uncanny, Godwin was
attempting something alien to his mind and temper.
In Godwin's _St. Leon_ the elixir of life is quietly bestowed on
the hero in a summer-house in his own garden. The poet, Thomas
Moore, in his romance, _The Epicurean_ (1827), sends forth a
Greek adventurer to seek it in the secret depths of the catacombs
beneath the pyramids of Egypt. He originally intended to tell his
story in verse, but after writing a fragment, _Alciphron_,
abandoned this design and decided to begin again in prose.
Pages:
145
146
147
148
149
150
151
152
153
154
155
156
157
158
159
160
161
162
163
164
165
166
167
168
169