Most of the tales in the present volume belong to the "Phantasus." A party of persons meet together for conversation on various subjects of art and literature, and these stories, with sundry other dramas, are read aloud by different members of the society. They are introduced with the following prefatory dialogue:--
"It is not at every moment, nor every time we choose to turn to her," said Antony, "that Nature will unfold her secrets to us; or rather, it is not always that we are in the mood to feel her sacredness. There must first be a harmony in ourselves, if we are to find what surrounds us harmonious; otherwise we do but cheat ourselves with empty phrases, without ever rising to a true enjoyment of beauty. It may be, perhaps, that there are times when unexpectedly some blessed influence descends out of Heaven upon our hearts, and unlocks the door of inspiration; but towards this we can add nothing. We have no right, no means of looking for it; it is a revelation within us we know not how. So much is certain, that it is not above twice, or at most three times, in a man's life that he has the fortune, in any true sense, to see a sunrise. When we do see it, it does not pass away like a summer cloud before our minds; rather it forms one of the great epochs in our lives. From such ecstatic feelings as we receive then it is long and long ere we recover; by the side of these exalted moments years dwindle into nothingness. But it is only in the calmness of solitude that these high gifts can descend upon us. A party collecting itself to see it as a sight on the top of a mountain, is only standing as it were before an exhibition at a theatre, and can bring from it nothing but the same kind of empty pleasure and foolish criticisms."
"Still stranger is it," said Ernest, "that the great majority of men are so dead to that awe and wonder, that fearful amazement with which Nature often fills some minds. If they can feel it, it is only as an obscure bewildered sensation of they know not what."
"It is not only on the dreary peaks of the St. Gothard that we can feel the terribleness of Nature. There are times when the most beautiful scene is full of spectres that fly shrieking and screaming across our hearts. Such strange shadowy forms, such wild forebodings, go often hunting up and down our fancy, that we are fain to fly from them in terror, and rid ourselves of our phantom rider, by plunging into the dissipations of the world. While under such influences wild poems and stories often rise up in us to people the dreary chaos of desolation, and adorn it with creations of art; and these forms and figures will be unconscious betrayers of the tone and temper of the mind in which they spring. In these kind of stories the beautiful mingles itself with the terrible, the sublime with the childish, goading our fancy into a kind of poetic madness, and then turning it to roam at will through the entire fabric of our souls."