individual, remoteness is always allied to
mystery and wonder. Neither child-state
can understand the possibility of any of the
common-places of daily life being repeated in
the shadowy regions afar off, which it is
supposed must be lulling abodes of rest and
pleasure, or else the haunt of startling contradictions
to our sense of proportion and fitness.
Thus, the Elysian fields were islands of the
distant, boundless, and legend-haunted
Atlantic, beyond the limits of the known world;
and Tartarus, or Hell, was in Spain—a
country of which the ancient Greeks were
very ignorant. To the Persians and Arabians,
the gloomy and desert mountains of Caucasus
are rendered sacred by the belief that they
are inhabited by Genii and the ghosts of
Pre-Adamite Sultans; and when our early
European travellers first entered the marvellous
lands of the East, they saw, or dreamed they
saw, all the hobgoblins and uncouth animals
which they had read of in the pages of
Herodotus, Pliny, Philostratus (the biographer of
Apollonius of Tyana), and other ancient
writers.

Chimæras and Anomalies have been
frequently introduced into modern poetry, though
almost entirely derived from ancient traditions.
The first of all, however, — Caliban
and the half-human shapes of the Tempest,
appearing and disappearing like monstrous
visions, with dreary mutterings and
stupendous sounds—have in them the true spirit
of the wild and shadowy North, superadded
to the physical horror of the Greek deformities.
One great superiority of Gothic
poetry and fable over classic, in such matters
as these, is the finer sense of spirituality
which pervades it. Something beyond the
mere outline and substance is always implied.
A vagueness and a darkness, haunted by we
know not what, brood over, and enfold as
with an atmosphere, the most extravagant
creations. The apparitions in the Tempest,
for instance, are not simply terrible or beautiful
in form, according to their respective
natures; but are continually prompting a
finer, subtler, and more profound terror or
beauty than can be conveyed by any mere
superficial appearance. They move before a
sky of fluctuating suggestions and cloud-like
hints; they issue out of abysses that are their
native homes and carry with them an air of
primeval mystery and wonder, that dilates
and glides away before the mind that attempts
to grasp it; they are psychologically true to
the aspects they present. The incarnations
of the Greeks were more statuesque, definite,
and fixed. Their religion, except in the
interpretation of Plato and a few others—was
material, rather than spiritual; and (if we
are not pushing the matter too far) their clear
and crystal climate, showing distant as well
as close objects in all their sharpness of
outline, may have encouraged a simliar
keenly-defined and marmoreal character in their
genius. Our climate, on the contrary, casts a
sort of veil even over familiar things, and
throws the mind in upon itself, forcing it to
contemplate the riddle of its own existence.

In a recent number of Household Words*
we quoted a passage from Stowe, which
appears to have suggested to Shakespeare the
idea of Sycorax, Caliban, and the other monsters
of the Tempest; but, according to some
commentators, he was indebted in this
particular to Sylvester Jourdan's account of the
discovery of the Bermudas. These islands,
from the dreadful storms which were continually
raging round them, and perhaps from
their far outlying in the lonely sea, as well as
from the barren and deserted character of the
coasts, were supposed to be enchanted, and to
be under the especial patronage of the Devil,
after whom, indeed, they were sometimes
named; and it is related that when Sir George
Somers was wrecked here in the reign of
James the First, a sea-monster, having some
affinity to a man, had the courtesy to present
himself. Pomponius Mela mentions a race
of Africans called Blemmii, who, being without
heads, had their eyes and mouth in their
breasts. Shakespeare was probably acquainted
with this fiction, and thus derived a suggestion
which he has embodied in the remark of
Gonzalo, after the disappearance of the
strange shapes which carry in the banquet:—

When we were boys,
Who would believe that there were mountaineers
Dew-lapp'd like bulls, whose throats had hanging at
them
Wallets of flesh? or that there were such men
Whose heads stood in their breasts?
Act iii. sc. 3.

Othello, also, speaks of

Men whose heads
Do grow beneath their shoulders.
Act. i. sc. 3.
* See A Scientific Figment, vol. x. p. 453.

Malone seems to think that Shakespeare
derived his knowledge of these phenomena
from Sir Walter Raleigh, who gives an
account of them in his Description of Guiana—
a book, says the commentator, that, without
doubt, Shakespeare had read. St. Augustine
testifies to the existence of the same hobgoblins
in Ethiopia. In his thirty-third sermon,
entitled To his Brothers in the Desert, he
says:—I was already Bishop of Hippo when
I went into Ethiopia, with some servants of
Christ, to preach the Gospel there. We saw
in this country many men and women without
heads, who had two large eyes in their
chests. If the bishop stayed long in this
surprising land, a man with an ordinary
cranium must have been as much a matter of
wonder to him as the contrary was at first.
An Eastern sorcerer, of the name of Setteiah,
is recorded to have had his head in his bosom,
and to have otherwise departed from the
characteristics of humanity to an extent, and
in a manner truly ghastly, though dashed