destined to become so numerous, and in many cases so resplendent in

artistic merit. It is, when one reflects upon it, genuinely remarkable

that weird narration as a fixed and academically recognized literary form

should have been so late of final birth. The impulse and atmosphere are as

old as man, but the typical weird tale of standard literature is a child

of the eighteenth century.

III. The Early Gothic Novel

The shadow-haunted landscapes of Ossian, the chaotic visions of William

Blake, the grotesque witch dances in Burns's Tam O'Shanter, the sinister

daemonism of Coleridge's Christobel and Rime of the Ancient Mariner, the

ghostly charm of James Hogg's Kilmeny, and the more restrained approaches

to cosmic horror in Lamia and many of Keats's other poems, are typical

British illustrations of the advent of the weird to formal literature. Our

Teutonic cousins of the Continent were equally receptive to the rising

flood, and Burger's Wild Huntsman and the even more famous

daemon-bridegroom ballad of Lenore -- both imitated in English by Scott,

whose respect for the supernatural was always great -- are only a taste of

the eerie wealth which German song had commenced to provide. Thomas Moore

adapted from such sources the legend of the ghoulish statue-bride (later

used by Prosper Merimee in The Venus of Ille, and traceable back to great

antiquity) which echoes so shiveringly in his ballad of The Ring; whilst

Goethe's deathless masterpiece Faust, crossing from mere balladry into the