a friend upon the subject of the purchase of some stuff, which she had
not bought, "because," said she, "it was ell wide." The words "ell
wide," perfectly incomprehensible to the child, seized upon his fancy,
and produced some image of terror by which for a long time his poor
little mind was haunted. Certainly this is a powerful instance, among
innumerable and striking ones, of the fact that the fears of children
are by no means the result of the objects of alarm suggested to them by
the ghost-stories, bogeys, etc., of foolish servants and companions;
they quite as often select or create their terrors for themselves, from
sources so inconceivably strange, that all precaution proves ineffectual
to protect them from this innate tendency of the imaginative faculty.
This "ell wide" horror is like something in a German story. The strange
aversion, coupled with a sort of mysterious terror, for beautiful and
agreeable or even quite commonplace objects, is one of the secrets of
the profound impression which the German writers of fiction produce. It
belongs peculiarly to their national genius, some of whose most striking
and thrilling conceptions are pervaded with this peculiar form of the
sentiment of fear. Hoffman and Tieck are especially powerful in their
use of it, and contrive to give a character of vague mystery to simple
details of prosaic events and objects, to be found in no other works of
fiction. The terrible conception of the _Doppelgänger_, which exists in
a modified form as the wraith of Scottish legendary superstition, is
rendered infinitely more appalling by being taken out of its misty
highland half-light of visionary indefiniteness, and produced in
frock-coat and trousers, in all the shocking distinctness of
commonplace, everyday, contemporary life. The Germans are the only
people whose imaginative faculty can cope with the homeliest forms of
reality, and infuse into them _vagueness_, that element of terror most
alien from familiar things. That they may be tragic enough we know, but
that they have in them a mysterious element of terror of quite