Superstitions of the Scottish
Highlands, adjures Home, the author of Douglas, to sing:

            "how, framing hideous spells,
  In Sky's lone isle, the gifted wizard-seer
  Lodged in the wintry cave with Fate's fell spear
  Or in the depths of Uist's dark forests dwells,
  How they whose sight such dreary dreams engross
  With their own vision oft astonished droop
  When o'er the wintry strath or quaggy moss
  They see the gliding ghosts unbodied troop."

Burns, in the foreword to Halloween (1785), writes in the "enlightened" spirit of the eighteenth century, but in the poem itself throws himself whole-heartedly into the hopes and fears that agitate the lovers. He owed much to an old woman who lived in his home in infancy:

"She had … the largest collection in the country of tales and songs concerning devils, ghosts, fairies, brownies, witches, warlocks, spunkies, kelpies, elf-candles, dead-lights, wraiths, apparitions, cantraips, giants, enchanted towers, dragons and other trumpery. This cultivated the latent seeds of poetry, but had so strong an effect on my imagination, that to this hour, in my nocturnal rambles, I sometimes keep a sharp look-out in suspicious places; it often takes an effort of philosophy to shake off these idle terrors."[7]

Tam o' Shanter, written for Captain Grose, was perhaps based on a Scottish legend, learnt at the inglenook in childhood, from this old wife, or perhaps

  "By some auld houlet-haunted biggin
  Or kirk deserted by its riggin,"

from Captain Grose himself, who made to quake:

  "Ilk ghaist that haunts auld ha' or chamer,
  Ye gipsy-gang that deal in glamor,
  And you, deep-read in hell's black grammar,
         Warlocks and witches."

In it Burns reveals with lively reality the terrors that assail the reveller on his homeward way through the storm:

  "Past the birks and meikle stane
  Where drunken Charlie brak's neck-bane;
  And through the whins, and by the cairn
  Where hunters fand the murdered bairn
  And near the thorn, aboon the well
  Where Mungo's mither hanged hersell."

For sheer terror the wild, fantastic witch-dance, seen through a Gothic window in the ruins of Kirk-Alloway, with the light of humour strangely glinting through, has hardly been surpassed. The Ballad-collections, beginning with Percy's Reliques of Ancient English Poetry (1705), brought poets back to the original sources of terror in popular tradition, and helped to revive the latent feelings of awe, wonder and fear. In Coleridge's Ancient Manner the skeleton-ship with its ghastly crew—the spectre-woman and her deathmate—the sensations of the mariner, alone on a wide, wide sea, seize on our imagination with irresistible power. The very substance of the poem is woven of the supernatural. The dream imagery is thrown into relief by occasional touches of reality—the lighthouse, the church on the cliff, the glimpses of the wedding, the quiet song of the hidden brook in the leafy month of June. We, like the mariner, after loneliness so awful that

        "God himself
  Scarce seemèd there to be,"

welcome the firm earth beneath our feet, and the homely sound of the vesper bell. In Christabel we float dreamily through scenes as unearthly and ephemeral as the misty moonlight, and the words in which Coleridge conjures up his vision fall into music of magic beauty. The opening of the poem creates a sense of foreboding, and the horror of the serpent-maiden is subtly suggested through her effect on Christabel. Coleridge hints at the terrible with artistic reticence. In Kubla Khan the chasm is:

  "A savage place! as holy and enchanted
  As e'er beneath a waning moon was haunted
  By woman wailing for her demon-lover."

The poetry of Keats is often mysterious and suggestive of terror.
The description of the Gothic hall in The Eve of St. Agnes:

  "In all the house was heard no human sound;
  A chain-drooped lamp was flickering by each door;
  The arras, rich with horseman, hawk and hound,
  Fluttered in the besieging wind's uproar;
  And the long carpets rose along the gusty floor;"

the serpent-maiden, Lamia, who

  "Seemed at once some penanced lady elf,
  Some demon's mistress, or the demon's self;"

the grim story in Isabella of Lorenzo's ghost, who

  "Moaned a ghostly undersong
  Like hoarse night-gusts sepulchral briers along."

all lead us over the borderland. In a rejected stanza of the Ode on Melancholy, he abandons the horrible:

  "Though you should build a bark of dead men's bones
  And rear a phantom gibbet for a mast,
  Stitch shrouds together for a sail, with groans
  To fill it out, blood-stained and aghast;
  Although your rudder be a dragon's tail
  Long severed, yet still hard with agony,
  Your cordage, large uprootings from the skull
  Of bald Medusa, certes you would fail
  To find the Melancholy—"

Keats's melancholy is not to be found amid images of horror:

  "She dwells with Beauty—Beauty that must die,
  And Joy, whose hand is ever at his lips
  Bidding adieu."

In La Belle Dame sans Merci he conveys with delicate touch the memory of the vision which haunts the knight, alone and palely loitering. We see it through his eyes:

  "I saw pale kings and princes too,
  Pale warriors, death-pale were they all:
  They cried—'La Belle Dame sans Merci
  Hath thee in thrall!'

  "I saw their starv'd lips in the gloam
  With horrid warning gaped wide,
  And I awoke and found me here,
  On the cold hill's side."

From effects so exquisitely wrought as these it seems almost profane to turn to the crude attempts of such poets as "Monk" Lewis or Southey to sound the note of terror. Yet they too, in their fashion, played a part in the "Renascence of Wonder." Coleridge, fascinated by the spirit of "gramarye" in Bürger's Lenore, etherealised and refined it. Scott and Lewis gloried in the gruesome details and spirited rhythm of the ballad, and in their supernatural poems wish to startle and terrify, not to awe, their readers. Those who revel in phosphorescent lights and in the rattle of the skeleton are apt to o'erleap themselves; and Scott's Glenfinlas, Lewis's Alonzo the Brave and the Fair Imogene and Southey's Old Woman of Berkeley fall into the category of the grotesque. Hogg intentionally mingles the comic and the terrible in his poem, The Witch of Fife, but his prose-stories reveal his power of creating an atmosphere of diablerie, undisturbed by intrusive mockery. In the poem Kilmeny, he handles an uncanny theme with dreamy beauty.

From the earliest times to the present day, writers of fiction have realised the force of supernatural terror. In the Babylonica of Iamblichus, the lovers evade their pursuers by passing as spectres; the scene of the romance is laid in tombs, caverns, and robbers' dens, a setting remarkably like that of Gothic story. Into the English novel of the first half of the eighteenth century, however, the ghost dares not venture. The innate desire for the