Page:The Great Secret.djvu/29

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THE VAGUE HORROR.
13

soul that Westerns can aspire to, according to the Easterns.

There are different qualities and degrees of danger which touch the human heart with more or less intensity. The danger of death in battle, or while the tempest is raging at its fiercest, and driving the vessel full butt against the rocks. These thrill the brave heart with an excitement which is almost a pleasure after the first pang of anticipated agony has passed. They know, who have been wounded, that the plunge of a dagger or a sword into the body gives no more pain than the prick of a pin, less if the stroke is swiftly dealt and deadly. Those who have been crushed by a fall or a heavy blow can never recall any sensation of pain when the smash came, it is afterwards, when Nature begins to set about the mending, that the pain comes.

A bed of sickness, if lingering, is probably one of the hardest ordeals humanity has to pass through before the friend of man—Death—liberates him, for that is Nature's inquisition, where no pity is shown to the victim while consciousness remains to endure. But the most excruciating of all dangers is when it attacks the imagination with its nightmare-like vagueness and suspense of uncertainty. Hell-fire is one of those dangers which has weighed upon and worn the imagination for so many centuries, making base slaves of the stoutest hearts, as Hamlet says":—

To die,—to sleep;—
To sleep! perchance to dream; ay, there's the rub:
For in that sleep of death, what dreams may come,
When we have shuffled off this mortal coil,
Must give us pause.

It was a vague and horrible uncertainty, and horror like that of Hades which had fallen upon the passengers