Imaginative authors may write, moralists may preach, and scholars may
criticise, but they are dealing all the time in a coinage of which they
know not the actual value. Their listener gets a sensation--but not the
true one. Until you have faced these emotions," he went on, with the
same race of words that had come from him the whole evening, "and made
them your own, your slaves, you have no idea of the power that is in
them--hunger, that shows lights beckoning beyond the grave; thirst, that
fills with mingled ice and fire; passion, love, loneliness, revenge,
and--" He paused for a minute, and though I knew we were on the brink I
was powerless to hold him. " . . . _and fear_," he went on--"fear . . .
I think that death from fear, or madness from fear, must sum up in a
second of time the total of all the most awful sensations it is possible
for a man to know."
"Then you have yourself felt something of this fear," I interrupted;
"for you said just now--"
"I do not mean physical fear," he replied; "for that is more or less a
question of nerves and will, and it is imagination that makes men
cowards.
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