Many of
the stories are Gothic novels, reduced in size, but with room for
all the old machinery:
"A novel now is nothing more
Than an old castle, and a creaking door,
A distant hovel,
Clanking of chains--a galley--a light--
Old armour, and a phantom all in white,
And there's a novel."
In _The Story-Teller_, a magazine which reprinted many popular
tales, we find German legends like _The Three Students of
Goettingen_, a "True Story Very Strange and Very Pitiful"; _The
Wood Demon; The Wehr-Wolf; The Sexton of Cologne, or Lucifer_, a
striking story of an Italian artist who was haunted by a terrible
figure he had painted in the church at Arezzo. Yet the first tale
in the collection, _The Story-Haunted_, which describes the sad
fate of a youth brought up in a solitary library reading romances
to his mother, was intended, like _The Spectre-Smitten_, in
_Passages from the Diary of a Late Physician_,[128] as a solemn
warning against over-indulgence in fictitious terrors. The mother
dies in an agony of horror, as her son reads aloud the account of
the Gentleman of Florence, who was pursued by a spectre of
himself, which vanished with him finally into the earth, as the
priest endeavoured to bless him. The son, left alone, enters the
world, and judges the people around him by the standard of books.
Pages:
236
237
238
239
240
241
242
243
244
245
246
247
248
249
250
251
252
253
254
255
256
257
258
259
260