There they dance to their doom till their feet shall find the
precipice that was prepared for them on the day that they planned the
evil things they have done.
The Nightmare Countries
There are certain lands in the darker dreams of poetry that stand out
in the memory of generations. There is for instance Poe's ``Dark tarn
of Auber, the ghoul-haunted region of Weir''; there are some queer
twists in the river Alph as imagined by Coleridge; two lines of
Swinburne:
By the tideless dolorous inland sea
In a land of sand and ruin and gold
are as haunting as any. There are in literature certain regions of
gloom, so splendid that whenever you come on them they leave in the
mind a sort of nightmare country which one's thoughts revisit on
hearing the lines quoted.
It is pleasant to picture such countries sometimes when sitting before
the fire. It is pleasant because you can banish them by the closing of
a book; a puff of smoke from a pipe will hide them altogether, and
back come the pleasant, wholesome, familiar things. But in France they
are there always. In France the nightmare countries stand all night in
the starlight; dawn comes and they still are there.
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