 primeval
times when Adam walked majestic as a god, bluff-bowed and fearless as this
mighty steed. Whether marching amid his aides and marshals in the van of
countless cohorts that endlessly streamed it over the plains, like an Ohio; or
whether with his circumambient subjects browsing all around at the horizon, the
White Steed gallopingly reviewed them with warm nostrils reddening through his
cool milkiness; in whatever aspect he presented himself, always to the bravest
Indians he was the object of trembling reverence and awe. Nor can it be
questioned from what stands on legendary record of this noble horse, that it was
his spiritual whiteness chiefly, which so clothed him with divineness; and that
this divineness had that in it which, though commanding worship, at the same
time enforced a certain nameless terror.
    But there are other instances where this whiteness loses all that accessory
and strange glory which invests it in the White Steed and Albatross.
    What is it that in the Albino man so peculiarly repels and often shocks the
eye, as that sometimes he is loathed by his own kith and kin! It is that
whiteness which invests him, a thing expressed by the name he bears. The Albino
is as well made as other men - has no substantive deformity - and yet this mere
aspect of all-pervading whiteness makes him more strangely hideous than the
ugliest abortion. Why should this be so?
    Nor, in quite other aspects, does Nature in her least palpable but not the
less malicious agencies, fail to enlist among her forces this crowning attribute
of the terrible. From its snowy aspect, the gauntleted ghost of the Southern
seas has been denominated the White Squall. Nor, in some historic instances, has
the art of human malice omitted so potent an auxiliary. How wildly it heightens
the effect of that passage in Froissart, when, masked in the snowy symbol of
their faction, the desperate White Hoods of Ghent murder their bailiff in the
market-place!
    Nor, in some things, does the common, hereditary experience of all mankind
fail to bear witness to the supernaturalism of this hue. It cannot well be
doubted, that the one visible quality in the aspect of the dead which most
appals the gazer, is the marble pallor lingering there; as if indeed that pallor
were as much like the badge of consternation in the other world, as of mortal
trepidation here. And from that pallor of the dead, we borrow the expressive hue
of the shroud in which we wrap them. Nor even in our superstitions do we fail to
throw the same snowy mantle round our phantoms; all ghosts rising in a
milk-white
