To indulge, for a moment, in any attempt at thought, is to be inevitably lost for reflection but urges us to forbear, and therefore it is, I say, that we cannot. There is no passion in nature so demoniacally impatient, as that of him who, shuddering upon the edge of a precipice, thus meditates a Plunge. And this fall - this rushing annihilation - for the very reason that it involves that one most ghastly and loathsome of all the most ghastly and loathsome images of death and suffering which have ever presented themselves to our imagination - for this very cause do we now the most vividly desire it.Īnd because our reason violently deters us from the brink, therefore do we the most impetuously approach it. It is merely the idea of what would be our sensations during the sweeping precipitancy of a fall from such a height. By gradations, still more imperceptible, this cloud assumes shape, as did the vapor from the bottle out of which arose the genius in the Arabian Nights.īut out of this our cloud upon the precipice's edge, there grows into palpability, a shape, far more terrible than any genius or any demon of a tale, and yet it is but a thought, although a fearful one, and one which chills the very marrow of our bones with the fierceness of the delight of its horror. By slow degrees our sickness and dizziness and horror become merged in a cloud of unnamable feeling. Our first impulse is to shrink from the danger. We peer into the abyss - we grow sick and dizzy.
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