july 7, 1891.

in the woods

i cannot tell why it is, but to be alone among woods, especially towards evening, is often attended with a vague unrest, an unsubstantial awe, which, though of the nature of pleasure, is perilously near the confines of horror. on certain days, when the nerves are very alert and the woods unusually still, i have known the sense become almost insupportable. there is a certain feeling of being haunted, followed, watched, almost dogged, which is bewildering and unmanning. foolish as it may appear, i have found the carrying of a gun almost a relief on such occasions. but what heightens the sense in a strange degree is the presence of still water. a stream is lively—it encourages and consoles; but the sight of a long dark lake, with the woods coming down to the water’s edge, is a sight so solemn as to be positively oppressive. each kind of natural scenery has its own awe—the genius loci, so to speak. on a grassy down there is the terror of the huge[169] open-eyed gaze of the sky. in craggy mountains there is something wild and beastlike frowning from the rocks. among ice and snow there is something mercilessly pure and averse to life; but neither of these is so intense or definite as the horror of still woods and silent waters. the feeling is admirably expressed by mr. george macdonald in phantastes, a magical book. it is that sensation of haunting presences hiding behind trees, watching us timidly from the fern, peeping from dark copses, resting among fantastic and weather-worn rocks, that finds expression in the stories of dryads and fairies, which seem so deeply implanted in the mind of man. who, on coming out through dark woods into some green sequestered lawn, set deep in the fringing forest, has not had the sensation of an interrupted revel, as festivity suddenly abandoned by wild, ethereal natures, who have shrunk in silent alarm back into the sheltering shades? if only one had been more wary, and stolen a moment earlier upon the unsuspecting company!

but there is a darker and cloudier sensation, the admonitus locorum, which i have experienced upon fields of battle, and places where[170] some huge tragedy of human suffering and excitement has been wrought. i have felt it upon the rustic ploughland of jena, and on the grassy slopes of flodden; it has crept over me under the mouldering walls and frowning gateways of old guarded towns; and not only there, where it may be nothing but the reflex of shadowy imaginations, but on wind-swept moors and tranquil valleys, i have felt, by some secret intuition, some overpowering tremor of spirit, that here some desperate strife has been waged, some primeval conflict enacted. there is a spot in the valley of llanthony, a grassy tumulus among steep green hills, where the sense came over me with an uncontrollable throb of insight, that here some desperate stand was made, some barbarous themopyl? lost or won.

a dark secret

there is a place near golden end where i encountered a singular experience. i own that i never pass it now without some obsession of feeling; indeed, i will confess that when i am alone i take a considerable circuit to avoid the place. an ancient footway, trodden deep in a sandy covert, winds up through a copse, and comes out into a quiet place far from the high-road, in the heart of the wood.[171] here stands a mouldering barn, and there are two or three shrubs, an escalonia and a cypress, that testify to some remote human occupation. there is a stretch of green sward, varied with bracken, and on the left a deep excavation, where sand has been dug: in winter, a pool; in summer, a marshy place full of stiff, lush water-plants. in this place, time after time as i passed it, there seemed to be a strange silence. no bird seemed to sing here, no woodland beast to frisk here; a secret shame or horror rested on the spot. it was with no sense of surprise, but rather of resolved doubt, that i found, one bright morning, two labouring men bent over some object that lay upon the ground. when they saw me, they seemed at first to hesitate, and then asked me to come and look. it was a spectacle of singular horror: they had drawn from the marshy edge of the pool the tiny skeleton of a child, wrapped in some oozy and ragged cloths; the slime dripping from the eyeless cavities of the little skull, and the weeds trailing over the unsightly cerements. it had caught the eye of one of them as they were passing. “the place has always had an evil name,” said one of them with a strange solemnity. there had[172] been a house there, i gathered, inhabited by a mysterious evil family, a place of dark sin and hideous tradition. the stock had dwindled down to a wild solitary woman, who extracted a bare sustenance out of a tiny farm, and who alternated long periods of torpid gloom with disgusting orgies of drunkenness. thirty years ago she had died, and the farm had remained so long unlet that it was at last pulled down, and the land planted with wood. subsequent investigations revealed nothing; and the body had lain there, it was thought, for fully that time, preserved from decay by an iron-bound box in which it had been enclosed, and of which some traces still remained in reddish smears of rust and clotted nails. that picture—the sunlit morning, the troubled faces of the men, the silent spectatorial woods—has dwelt with me ineffaceably.

obsession

again, i have been constantly visited by the same inexplicable sensation in a certain room at golden end. the room in question is a great bare chamber at the top of the house: the walls are plastered, and covered in all directions by solid warped beams; through the closed and dusty window the sunlight filters sordidly into the room. i do not know why it has never[173] been furnished, but i gathered that my father took an unexplained dislike to the room from the first. the odd feature of it is, that in the wall at one end is a small door, as of a cupboard, some feet from the ground, which opens, not as you would expect into a cupboard, but into a loft, where you can see the tiles, the brickwork of the clustered chimney-stacks, and the plastered lathwork of the floor, in and below the joists of the timber. this strange opening can never have been a window, because the shutter is of the same date as the house; still less a door, for it is hardly possible to squeeze through it; but as the loft into which it looks is an accretion of later date than the room itself, it seems to me that the garret may have been once a granary up to which sacks were swung from the ground by a pulley; and this is made more possible by the existence of some iron staples on the outer side of it, that appear to have once controlled some simple mechanism.

the evil room

the room is now a mere receptacle for lumber, but it is strange that all who enter it, even the newest inmate of the house, take an unaccountable dislike to the place. i have myself struggled against the feeling; i once indeed[174] shut myself up there on a sunny afternoon, and endeavoured to shame myself by pure reason out of the disagreeable, almost physical sensation that at once came over me, but all in vain; there was something about the bare room, with its dusty and worm-eaten floor, the hot stagnant air, the floating motes in the stained sunlight, and above all the sinister little door, that gave me a discomfort that it seems impossible to express in speech. my own room must have been the scene of many a serious human event. sick men must have lain there; hopeless prayers must have echoed there; children must have been born there, and souls must have quitted their shattered tenement beneath its ancient panels. but these have after all been normal experiences; in the other room, i make no doubt, some altogether abnormal event must have happened, something of which the ethereal aroma, as of some evil, penetrating acid, must have bitten deep into wall and floor, and soaked the very beam of the roof with anxious and disturbed oppression. in feverish fancy i see strange things enact themselves; i see at the dead of night pale heads crane from the window, oppressive silence hold the room, as some dim and[175] ugly burden jerks and dangles from the descending rope, while the rude gear creaks and rustles, and the vane upon the cupola sings its melancholy rusty song in the glimmering darkness. it is strange that the mind should be so tangibly impressed and yet should have no power given it to solve the sad enigma.