The Tale of Terror - A Study of the Gothic Romance by Edith Birkhead
page 46 of 321 (14%)
page 46 of 321 (14%)
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predominating result."
The famous scene in _Ferdinand, Count Fathom_, the description of Danger in Collins' _Ode to Fear_, the Scottish ballad of _Hardyknute_ are mentioned as admirable examples of the fear excited by natural causes. In the fragment called _Montmorenci_, Drake aims at combining "picturesque description with some of those objects of terror which are independent of supernatural agency." As the curfew tolls sullenly, Henry de Montmorenci and his two attendants rush from a castle into the darkness of a stormy night. They hurry through a savage glen, in which a swollen torrent falls over a precipice. After hearing the crash of falling armour, they suddenly come upon a dying knight on whose pale features every mark of horror is depicted. Led by frightful screams of distress, Montmorenci and his men find a maiden, who has been captured by banditti. Montmorenci slays the leader, but is seized by the rest of the banditti and bound to a tree overlooking a stupendous chasm into which he is to be hurled. By almost superhuman struggles he effects his escape, when suddenly--there at this terror-fraught moment, the fragment wisely ends. In _The Abbey of Clunedale_ Drake experiments feebly and ineffectively with the "explained supernatural" in which Mrs. Radcliffe was an adept. The ruined abbey, deemed to be haunted, is visited at night as an act of penance by a man named Clifford who, in a fit of unfounded jealousy, has slain his wife's brother. Clifford, accompanied by his sister, and bearing a light, kneels at his wife's tomb, and is mistaken for a spectral being. |
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