Portrait, Chapter 4

The passage in which Joyce’s phrase occurs reads: ‘His heart trembled; his breath came faster and a wild spirit passed over his limbs as though he were soaring sunward. His heart trembled in an ecstasy of fear and his soul was in flight.’ Among the several prior instances of the phrase, the earliest may have been in Coleridge’s play Remorse: A Tragedy, in Five Acts (1813), Act 4, scene 1, where a stage direction referring to the character Isidore reads ‘He goes out of sight, opposite to the patch of moonlight: returns after a minute’s elapse, in an ecstasy of fear.’

One subsequent instance of the phrase occurs in the American essayist and poet Ralph Waldo Emerson’s (1803–1882) Society and Solitude: Twelve Chapters (London, 1870), where the essay entitled ‘Art’, on pp. 31–49, reads on p. 32:

The utterance of thought and emotion in speech and action may be conscious or unconscious.  The sucking child is an unconscious actor.  The man in an ecstasy of fear or anger is an unconscious actor.  A large part of our habitual actions are unconsciously done, and most of our necessary words are unconsciously said.

Another instance: in the British writer and physician Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s (1859–1930) detective novel—the second featuring Sherlock Holmes—The Sign of Four (London, 1890), with, in chap. 4, ‘The Story of the Bald-Headed Man’, on p. 49: ‘I listened to his heart, as requested, but was unable to find anything amiss, save, indeed, that he was in an ecstasy of fear, for he shivered from head to foot.’