 fog - Yea, while these terrors seize us, let us add, that even the
king of terrors, when personified by the evangelist, rides on his pallid horse.
    Therefore, in his other moods, symbolise whatever grand or gracious thing he
will by whiteness, no man can deny that in its profoundest idealised
significance it calls up a peculiar apparition to the soul.
    But though without dissent this point be fixed, how is mortal man to account
for it? To analyse it would seem impossible. Can we, then, by the citation of
some of those instances wherein this thing of whiteness - though for the time
either wholly or in great part stripped of all direct associations calculated to
impart to it aught fearful, but, nevertheless, is found to exert over us the
same sorcery, however modified; - can we thus hope to light upon some chance
clue to conduct us to the hidden cause we seek?
    Let us try. But in a matter like this, subtlety appeals to subtlety, and
without imagination no man can follow another into these halls. And though,
doubtless, some at least of the imaginative impressions about to be presented
may have been shared by most men, yet few perhaps were entirely conscious of
them at the time, and therefore may not be able to recall them now.
    Why to the man of untutored ideality, who happens to be but loosely
acquainted with the peculiar character of the day, does the bare mention of
Whitsuntide marshal in the fancy such long, dreary, speechless processions of
slow-pacing pilgrims downcast and hooded with new-fallen snow? Or, to the
unread, unsophisticated Protestant of the Middle American States, why does the
passing mention of a White Friar or a White Nun, evoke such an eyeless statue in
the soul?
    Or what is there apart from the traditions of dungeoned warriors and kings
(which will not wholly account for it) that makes the White Tower of London tell
so much more strongly on the imagination of an untravelled American than those
other storied structures, its neighbours - the Byward Tower, or even the Bloody?
And those sublimer towers, the White Mountains of New Hampshire, whence, in
peculiar moods, comes that gigantic ghostliness over the soul at the bare
mention of that name, while the thought of Virginia's Blue Ridge is full of a
soft, dewy, distant dreaminess? Or why, irrespective of all latitudes and
longitudes, does the name of the White Sea exert such a spectralness over the
fancy, while that of the Yellow Sea lulls us with mortal thoughts of long
lacquered mild afternoons on the waves, followed
