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Only the dogs, lolling, stretching, sending the warm steam of their breathing into the dead air, seemed to stand for the world of life, and the world of sentient creatures. And yet their very presence, unobtrusive in the forest shadows, by contrast thrust farther these others into the land of phantoms and of ghosts. Then quietly, as with one consent, the three living ones turned away.
Perhaps it is because of this dismal companion towards whom I turn my head, and whom I see trotting slowly and painfully at my side in the rumbling grayness of the evening exodus, that I have a sudden and tragic vision of the people, as in a flash's passing. Between these two phantoms in front the sable swarm outspreads.
The phantoms which had hitherto haunted him by night now appeared before him at midday. He saw spiders' webs hanging from the wall as large as the sails of a man-of-war. Then these webs changed to nets, whose meshes were constantly contracting only to enlarge again. These nets held black balls, and they, too, swelled and shrank. Suddenly he cried out: "The rats! Oh, the rats!"
He therefore feared the might of no supernatural prowess, save of the god Thor only, to the greatness of whose force nothing human or divine could fitly be compared. The hearts of men ought not to be terrified at phantoms, which were only awful from their ghastly foulness, and whose semblances, marked by counterfeit ghostliness, were wont for a moment to borrow materiality from the fluent air.
Their neighbours had not withheld their good offices, but they were still terrified and estranged by the phantoms of pestilence. During the last week Susan had been too weak to rise from her bed; yet such was the energy communicated by the tidings that Wallace was alive, and had returned, that she leaped upon her feet and rushed down-stairs.
But always the trees, frost-rimed, drifted past like phantoms; always the occult influences of the North loomed large on their horizon like mirages, dwindled in the actuality, but threatened again in the bigness of mystery when they had passed.
It is in far-away country places, where people read very little, that they see phantoms and consult the oracles of fate. Their dreams are real. The last point I would notice in the management of character is the importance of what may be called moral safety-valves.
Sometimes even several of them at a time. Animals are nothing else than the figures of our virtues and our vices, straying before our eyes, the visible phantoms of our souls. God shows them to us in order to induce us to reflect. Only since animals are mere shadows, God has not made them capable of education in the full sense of the word; what is the use?
His inventive fancy conjures up a thousand horrid phantoms, and surrounds the mistress of his soul with I know not what imaginary calamities. But that passage of the whole epistle that overwhelms me most, is one, in which, in spite of all the anguish of his mind, in spite of appearances, he expresses the most unsuspecting confidence in his false and treacherous friend.
He broke off with a rapt almost angelic expression in his eyes, then sighing a little he resumed: "All dreams of course! ... vague phantoms, creations of my own imaginative brain, yet fair enough to fill my heart with speechless longings for ethereal raptures unseen, unknown!
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