This train-fever is, of course, only a
symptom. It proceeds from that apprehensiveness of mind that is so common
and incurable an affliction. The complaint has been very well satirised by
one who suffered from it. "I have had many and severe troubles in my life,"
he said, "_but most of them never happened_." That is it. We people who
worry about the trains and similar things live in a world of imaginative
disaster. The heavens are always going to fall on us. We look ahead, like
Christian, and see the lions waiting to devour us, and when we find they
are only poor imitation lions, our timorous imagination is not set at rest,
but invents other lions to scare us out of our wits.
And yet intellectually we know that these apprehensions are worthless.
Experience has taught us that it is not the things we fear that come to
pass, but the things of which we do not dream. The bolt comes from the
blue. We take elaborate pains to guard our face, and get a thump in the
small of the back. We propose to send the fire-engine to Ulster, and turn
to see Europe in flames.
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