"I cannot change my feelings," said his grave friend. "From my very childhood these tunes have made me unhappy, and have often all but driven me out of my senses. They are to me the ghosts and spectres and furies in the world of sound, and they come and buz round my head, and grin at me with horrid laughter."
"Sheer nervousness!" returned the other; "just like your extravagant abhorrence of spiders and divers other harmless insects."
"Harmless you call them!" cried Emilius indignantly, "because you have no repugnance to such things. To him however that feels the same disgust and loathing, the same unutterable shuddering, as I feel, start up within him and shoot through his whole frame at the sight of them, these miscreate deformities, such as toads, beetles, or that most nauseous of all Nature's abortions, the bat, are not indifferent or insignificant: their very existence is a state of direct enmity and warfare against his. In good truth one might smile at the unbelievers whose imagination is too barren for ghosts and fearful goblins, and such births of night as we see in sickness, to grow up in it, or who stare and marvel at Dante's descriptions; when the commonest everyday life is perpetually paralysing our eyesight with some of these portentous distorted masterpieces among the works of horrour. Yet how can we have a real feeling and love for beauty, without detesting and recoiling from such monstrosities?"
"Why recoil from them?" askt Roderick: "why should we see nothing in the vast realm of water, in lakes, rivers, and seas, but those dismal objects which you have taught yourself to find there? why not rather look on such creatures as queer, amusing, and ludicrous mummers? so that the deep might be called a kind of large maskt ballroom. But your caprices go still further; for while you love roses with a sort of idolatry, there are other flowers for which you have a no less passionate hatred: yet what harm has the dear bright tulip ever done you? or all the other gay children of summer that you persecute? Thus again you have an antipathy to sundry colours, to sundry scents, and to a number of thoughts; and you never take any pains to strengthen yourself against these moods, but give way to them and sink down into them as into a luxurious feather bed; so that I often fear I shall lose you altogether some day, and find nothing but a patchwork of whims and prejudices sitting at that table instead of my Emilius."