Again they
would say: 'Now go down into hell;' and the scene changed as suddenly as
do those of a ten-cent panorama, when a midnight storm at sea or a
volcanic eruption is about to be rolled in view: I went down _ad
imis_--'down to the bottom of the sea--the earth with her bars was
around me forever.' Blank horror and anguish seized me. Hope fled to its
impregnable corner of my heart, till the calamity was overpast. A hushed
agony was upon me, as before I had known its boundless bliss. And thus
variously I fared through all that second night of sleeplessness. They
probably sent me up and down this scale of sensation twenty times during
eight hours. This night I was not at all sleepy. A few more such would
have finished the business; and there would have been 'another awful
effect of the spiritual delusion' to chronicle. The honest verdict of
the first century would have been: 'Another possessed of devils or
devil-crazed.' The wretches well knew that insomnia is an excellent
preparation for insanity.
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