The Mysteries of the Court of London — page 325: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

THE MURDERESS — 295 disordered mind conjures up from the opening sepulchre and the yawning grave, began to rise in the midst of the pitchy darkness, and low murmurings, such as the troubled fancy . conceives to be the voices of the dead, rustled as it were through the portentous silence of the place. Then, as the wretched woman sat in her dungeon cell, with eyes wildly glaring and horribly dilating, with cheeks blanched as those of a corpse, with lips white and quivering, with upheaved bosom and suspended breath, — as thus she sat, we say, it appeared as if she actually and positively beheld real substantial shapes of ghostly horror, and heard whispering voices of unearthly sound. Although a stupendous consternation held her motionless, paralyzed her tongue, and made her limbs rigid, yet were her feelings as acute and her sensations as keen as if no one faculty were suspended and no single energy held in abeyance. Hell was raging in her soul, — the tortures of the damned were racking her brain. The perspiration stood in large drops upon her brow. She was drenched from head to foot in her own agony. If every sinew, nerve, and fibre were laid bare and torn with pincers, if the scalp were removed and a searing iron applied to the brain thus exposed, if her eyes were torn from their sockets and molten lead or boiling oil dropped into the holes, — in fine, if all the tortures which man could invent or fiends inflict were now applied to her, they could not have exceeded the agonizing sensations which she experienced as those ghastly shapes began to arise in the midst of the darkness and those voices came like the low rustling of withered leaves upon her ear. The wretched woman could not restrain the play of her imagination, so hideous in its fantastic conceptions. She had utterly lost all control over her disordered mind, which thus ran wanton and wild in the realms of horror. She had no power to check the current of her thoughts and look all the objects of her terror in the face. To her, therefore, did they appear invested with a terrible reality and a ghastly substance. In a word, she laboured under the appalling belief that the spectres were no delusion and the voices no dream. ; What, then, was the nature of her reflections now? Re- flections, indeed! No; the ideas that traversed her brain were scarcely reflections, because she had no power to weigh C@NMUC « mee | \ Se my . ~2"% a _— " : . x. oe ‘'’ +. ~~ wag & F4.. {~ 2 Jae weed) <a ee) > ” ~ > a oe | . —_— . -~«. Ano . a SES OOO) <S (GO)