Blackwell Reference Online

Extract

Gorgons, and Hydras, and Chimaeras — dire stories of Celaeno and the Harpies - may reproduce themselves in the brain of superstition - but they were there before. They are transcripts, types - the archetypes are in us, and eternal.This sentence, dropped casually into the midst of Charles Lamb's essay, ‘Witches, and Other Night Fears’, is one of those seminal statements that define what was once considered ‘High’ Romanticism. Lamb's ‘transcripts’ invite comparison with The types and symbols of eternity, / The first, and last, and midst, and without end’, which Wordsworth ‘reads’ in the ravine of the Simplon Pass in The Prelude, and the emotions that, in De Quincey's account of the ‘palimpsest of the human brain’, are inscribed indelibly in the mind: ‘Everlasting layers of ideas, images, feelings, have fallen upon your brain softly as light. Each succession has seemed to bury all that went before, and yet in reality not one has been extinguished’. This is curious enough, until you realize that Lamb's claims are greater than De Quincey's, who argues only that the brain stores everything it experiences; for Lamb, the imagination contains emotions embedded before birth. Having quoted Ancient Mariner 451–6, he elucidates:That the kind of fear here treated of is purely spiritual - that it is strong in proportion as it is objectless upon earth - that it predominates in the period of sinless ... log in or subscribe to read full text