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the spring is really confirmed, and the showers but April-like and at intervals. Let us turn our imaginations to the bright side of spring, and we shall forget the showers. You see they have been forgotten just this moment. Besides, we are not likely to stray too far into the fields; and if we should, are there not hats, bonnets, barns, cottages, elm-trees, and good wills? We may make these things zests, if we please, instead of drawbacks.

OF DREAMS.

The materialists and psychologists are at issue upon the subject of dreams. The latter hold them to be one among the many proofs of the existence of a soul; the former endeavour to account for them upon principles altogether corporeal. We must own that the effect of their respective arguments, as is usual with us on these occasions, is not so much to satisfy us with either as to dissatisfy us with both. The psychologist, with all his struggles, never appears to be able to get rid of his body; and the materialist leaves something extremely deficient in the vivacity of his proofs by his ignorance of that Primum Mobile which is the soul of everything. In the meantime, while they go on with their laudable inquiries (for which we have a very sincere respect), it is our business to go on recommending a taste for results as well as causes, and turning everything to account in this beautiful star of ours, the earth, whether body or soul. There is no reason why the most learned investigator of the most subtle mysteries should not enjoy his existence, and have his earthly dreams made as pleasant as possible; and for our parts we see nothing at present, either in body or soul, but a medium for a world of perceptions, the very unpleasantest of whose dreams are but warnings to us how we depart from the health and natural piety of the pleasant

ones.

What seems incontrovertible in the case of dreams is, that they are most apt to take place when the body is most affected. They seem to turn most upon us, when the suspension of the will has been reduced to its most helpless state by indulgence. The door of the fancy is left without its keeper; and forth issue, pell-mell, the whole rout of ideas or images, which had been previously stored within the brain, and kept to their respective duties. They are like a school let loose, or the winds in Virgil, or Lord Anson's drunken sailors at Panama, who dressed themselves up in all sorts of ridiculous apparel; only they are far more wild, winged, and fantastic.

We were about to say that, being writers, we are of necessity dreamers; for thinking disposes the bodily faculties to be more than usually affected by the causes that generally produce dreaming. But extremes appear to meet on

this as on other occasions; at least, as far as the meditative power is concerned; for there is an excellent reasoner, now living, who, telling another that he was not fond of the wilder parts of the "Arabian Nights," was answered, with great felicity, "Then you never dream;"which, it turned out, was actually the case: Here the link is totally lost that connects a tendency to indigestion with thinking on the one hand, and dreaming on the other. If we are to believe Herodotus, the Atlantes, an African people, never dreamt; which Montaigne is willing to attribute to their never having eaten anything that died of itself. It is to be presumed that he looked upon their temperance as a matter of course. The same philosopher, who was a deep thinker, and of a delicate constitution, informs us that he himself dreamt but sparingly; but then, when he did, his dreams were fantastic, though cheerful. This is the very triumph of the animal spirits, to unite the strangeness of sick dreams with the cheerfulness of healthy ones. To these exceptions against the usual theories, we may add that dreams, when they occur, are by no means modified of necessity by what the mind has been occupied with in the course of the day, or even of months; for during our two years' confinement in prison, we have a strong recollection that we did not dream more than twice of our chief subjects of reflection, the prison itself not excepted. The two dreams were both about the latter, and both the same. We fancied that we had slipped out of jail, and gone to the theatre, where we were much horrified by seeing the faces of the whole audience unexpectedly turned upon us.

It is certain enough, however, that dreams in general proceed from indigestion; and it appears nearly as much so, that they are more or less strange according to the waking fancy of the dreamer.

"All dreams, as in old Galen I have read,
Are from repletion and complexion bred,
From rising fumes of indigested food,
And noxious humours that infect the blood.
When choler overflows, then dreams are bred
Of flames, and all the family of red.
Choler adust congeals the blood with fear;
Then black bulls toss us, and black devils tear.
In sanguine airy dreams aloft we bound;
With rheums oppressed we sink, in rivers drowned."

-Dryden's "Cock and the Fox," from Chaucer.

Again, in another passage which is worth quoting instead of the original, and affords a good terse specimen of the author's versification:

"Dreams are but interludes which Fancy makes;
When monarch Reason sleeps, this mimic wakes;
Compounds a medley of disjointed things,
A mob of cobblers and a court of kings.*

* Perhaps a misprint for

" A court of cobblers and a mob of kings."

Light fumes are merry, grosser fumes are sad,
Both are the reasonable soul run mad ;
And many monstrous forms in sleep we see,
That neither were, nor are, nor e'er can be.
Sometimes forgotten things long cast behind
Rush forward in the brain, and come to mind.
The nurse's legends are for truths received,
And the man dreams but what the boy believed.
Sometimes we but rehearse a former play;
The night restores our actions done by day,
As hounds in sleep will open for their prey.
In short, the farce of dreams is of a piece,
Chimeras all; and more absurd, or less."

It is probable, at the same time, that a trivial degree of indigestion will give rise to very fantastic dreams in a fanciful mind; while on the other hand a good orthodox repletion is necessary towards a fanciful creation in a dull one. It shall make an epicure, of any vivacity, act as many parts in his sleep as a tragedian, "for that night only." The inspirations of veal in particular are accounted extremely Delphic: Italian pickles partake of the spirit of Dante; and a butter-boat shall contain as many ghosts

as Charon's.

There is a passage in Lucian which would have made a good subject for those who painted the temptations of the saints. It is a description of the City of Dreams, very lively and crowded. We quote after Natalis Comes, not having the true history by us.

The city, we are told, stands

in an immense plain, surrounded by a thick forest of tall poppy trees, and enormous mandragoras. The plain is also full of all sorts of somniculous plants; and the trees are haunted with multitudes of owls and bats, but no other bird. The city is washed by the river Lethe, called by others the Night-bringer, whose course is inaudible and like the flowing of oil. (Spenser's follower, Browne, has been here:

"Where consort none other fowl

Than the bat and sullen owl;
Where flows Lethe without coil,
Softly, like a stream of oil."

-Inner Temple Mask.)

There are two gates to the city: one of horn, in which almost everything that can happen in sleep is represented, as in a transparency; the other of ivory, in which the dreams are but dimly shadowed. The principal temple is that of Night; and there are others, dedicated to Truth and Falsehood, who have oracles. The population consists of Dreams, who are of an infinite variety of shape. Some are small and slender; others distorted, humped, and monstrous; others very proper and tall, with blooming, good-tempered faces. Others again have terrible countenances, are winged, and seem eternally threatening the city with some calamity; while others walk about in the pomp and garniture of kings. If any mortal comes into the place, there is a multitude of domestic Dreams, who meet him with offers of service;

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If Lucian had divided his city into ranks and denominations, he might possibly have classed them under the general heads of Dreams Lofty, Dreams Ludicrous, Dreams Pathetic, Dreams Horrible, Dreams Bodily Painful or Pleasant, Dreams of Common Life, Dreams of New Aspects of Humanity, Dreams Mixed, Fantastic, and utterly Confused. He speaks of winged ones; which is judicious, for they are very common; but unless Natalis Comes, who is not a very bright person, misrepresents him, he makes them of the melancholy class, which in general they

are not.

"In sanguine airy dreams aloft we bound."

Nothing is more common, or usually more pleasant, than to dream of flying. It is one of the best specimens of the race; for, besides being agreeable, it is made up of the dreams of ordinary life, and those of surprising combination. Thus the dreamer sometimes thinks he is flying in unknown regions, sometimes skimming only a few inches above the gronnd, and wondering he never did it before. He will even dream that he is dreaming about it; and yet is so fully convinced of its feasibility, and so astonished at his never having hit upon so delightful a truism, that he is resolved to practise it the moment he "One has only," says he, "just to give

wakes.

a little spring with one's foot-so-and-oh it's the easiest and most obvious thing in the world. I'll always skim hereafter." We once dreamt that a woman set up some flying rooms, as a person does a tavern. We went to try them; and nothing could be more satisfactory and commonplace on all sides. The landlady welcomed us with a courtesy, hoped for friends and favours, etc., and then showed us into a spacious room, not round, as might be expected, but long, and after the usual dining fashion. “Perhaps, sir," said she, "you would like to try the room;" upon which we made no more ado, but sprung up and made two or three genteel circuits, now taking the height of it like a house-lark, and then cutting the angles like a swallow. “Very pretty flying indeed," said we, "and very moderate."

A house for the purpose of taking flights in, when the open air was to be had for nothing, is fantastic enough; but what shall we say to those confoundings of all time, place, and substance, which are constantly happening to persons of any creativeness of diaphragm? Thus you shall meet a friend in a gateway, who besides being your friend shall be your enemy; and besides being Jones or Tomkins, shall be a bull; and

besides asking you in, shall oppose your entrance. Nevertheless, you are not at all surprised; or if surprised, are only so at something not at all surprising. To be Tomkins and a bull at once, is the most ordinary of commonplaces; but that, being a bull, he should have horns, is what astonishes you; and you are also amazed at his not being in Holborn or the Strand, where he never lived. To be in two places at once is not uncommon to a dreamer. He will also be young and old at the same time, a schoolboy and a man; will live many years in a few minutes, like the sultan who dipped his head in the tub of water; will be full of zeal and dialogue upon some matter of indifference; go to the opera with a dish under his arm, to be in the fashion; talk faster in verse than prose; and ask a set of horses to a musical party, telling them that he knows they will be pleased, because blue is the general wear, and Mozart has gone down to Gloucestershire to fit up a house for Epaminondas.

It is a curious proof of the concern which body has in these vagaries, that when you dream of any particular limb being in pain, you shall often have gone to sleep in a posture that affects it. A weight on the feet will produce dreams in which you are rooted to the ground, or caught by a goblin out of the earth. A cramped hand or leg shall get you tortured in the inquisition; and a head too much thrown back, give you the sense of an interminable visitation of stifling. The nightmare, the heaviest punisher of repletion, will visit some persons, merely for lying on their backs; which shows how much it is concerned in a particular condition of the frame. Sometimes it lies upon the chest like a vital lump. Sometimes it comes in the guise of a horrid dwarf, or malignant little hag, who grins in your teeth and will not let you rise. Its most common enormity is to pin you to the ground with excess of fear, while something dreadful is coming up, a goblin or a mad bull. Sometimes the horror is of a very elaborate description, such as being spell-bound in an old house, which has a mysterious and shocking possessor. He is a gigantic deformity, and will pass presently through the room in which you are sitting. He comes, not a giant, but a dwarf, of the most strange and odious description, hairy, spiderlike, and chuckling. His mere passage is unbearable. The agony rises at every step. You would protest against so malignant a sublimation of the shocking, but are unable to move or speak. At length, you give loud and long-drawn groans, and start up with a preternatural effort, awake.

Mr Coleridge, whose sleeping imagination seems proportioned to his waking, has described a fearful dream of mental and bodily torture. As the beautiful poems of "Christabel," etc., which accompany it, seem to have been too imaginative to be understood by the critics, and

consequently have wanted the general attention which the town are pleased to give or otherwise according to the injunctions of those gentlemen, we shall indulge ourselves in extracting the whole of it. It is entitled "The Pains of Sleep."

"Ere on my bed my limbs I lay,
It hath not been my use to pray
With moving lips or bended knees
But silently, by slow degrees,

My spirit I to love compose,
In humble trust mine eyelids close,
With reverential resignation,
No wish conceived, no thought expressed!
Only a sense of supplication,

A sense, o'er all my soul imprest,
That I am weak, yet not unblest,
Since in me, round me, everywhere,
Eternal Strength and Wisdom are.

"But yester-night I prayed aloud In anguish and in agony,

Upstarting from the fiendish crowd

Of shapes and thoughts that tortured me:
A lurid light, a trampling throng,
Sense of intolerable wrong,

And whom I scorned, those only strong!
Thirst of revenge, the powerless will
Still baffled, and yet burning still!
Desire with loathing strangely mixed,
On wild or hateful objects fixed.
Fantastic passions! madd'ning brawl!
And shame and terror over all!
Deeds to be hid which were not hid,
Which, all confused, I could not know
Whether I suffered, or I did:
For all seemed guilt, remorse or woe,
My own or others still the same,
Life stifling fear, soul stifling shame!

"So two nights passed: the night's dismay
Saddened and stunned the coming day.
Sleep, the wide blessing, seemed to me
Distemper's worst calamity.

The third night, when my own loud scream
Had waked me from the fiendish dream,
O'ercome with suffering strange and wild,
I wept as I had been a child;
And having thus by tears subdued
My anguish to a milder mood,
Such punishments, I said, were due
To nature's deepliest stained with sin:
For aye entempesting anew
Th' unfathomable hell within,
The horror of their deeds to view,
To know and loathe, yet wish and do!
Such griefs with such men well agree,
But wherefore, wherefore fall on me?
To be beloved is all I need,

And whom I love, I love indeed."

This is the dream of a poet, and does not end with the question of a philosopher. We do not pretend to determine why we should have any pains at all. It is enough for us, in our attempt to diminish them, that there are more pleasant than painful excitements in the world, and that many pains are the causes of pleasure. But what if these pains are for the same end? What

if all this heaping and war of agonies were owing to the author's having taken too little exercise, or eaten a heavier supper than ordinary? But then the proportion! What proportion, it may be asked, is there between the sin of neglected exercise and such infernal visitations as these? We answer-the proportion, not of the particular offence, but of the general consequences. We have before observed, but it cannot be repeated too often, that nature, charitable as any poet or philosopher can be upon the subject of merit and demerit, etc., seems to insist, beyond anything else, upon our taking care of the mould in which she has cast us; or, in other words, of that ground-work of all comfort, that box which contains the jewel of existence, our health. On turning to the preceding poem in the book, entitled "Kubla Khan," we perceive that in his introduction to that pleasanter vision the author speaks of the present one as the dream of pain and disease. "Kubla Khan," which was meditated under the effects of opium, he calls, "a psychological curiosity." It is so; but it is also, and still more, a somatological or bodily one; for body will effect these things upon the mind, when the mind can do no such thing upon itself; and therefore the shortest, most useful, and most philosophical way of proceeding, is to treat the phenomenon in the manner most serviceable to the health and comfort of both. We subjoin the conclusion of "Kubla Khan," as beginning with an exquisite piece of music, and ending with a most poetical phantasm :

"A damsel with a dulcimer,
In a vision once I saw,

It was an Abyssinian maid,
And on her dulcimer she played,
Singing of Mount Abora.

"Could I revive within me

Her symphony and song,

To such a deep delight 'twould win me.
That with music loud and long,
I would build that dome in air,
That sunny dome! those caves of ice:
And all who heard should see them there,
And all should cry, Beware, beware,
His flashing eyes, his floating hair!
Weave a circle round him thrice,
And close your eyes with holy dread;
For he on honey-dew hath fed,
And drunk the milk of Paradise."

If horrible and fantastic dreams are the most perplexing, there are pathetic ones perhaps still more saddening. A friend dreaming of the loss of his friend, or a lover of that of his mistress, or a kinsman of that of a dear relation, is steeped in the bitterness of death. To wake and find it not true, what a delicious sensation is that! On the other hand, to dream of a friend or a beloved relative restored to us, to live over again the hours of childhood at the knee of a beloved mother, to be on the eve of marrying an affectionate mistress, with a thousand other joys snatched back out of the grave, and too painful to dwell upon, what a dreary rush of sensation comes like a shadow upon us when we wake! How true, and divested of all that is called conceit in poetry, is that termination of Milton's sonnet on dreaming of his deceased wife!— "But oh, as to embrace me she inclined,

I waked; she fled; and day brought back my night." We wonder that so good and cordial a critic as Warton should think this a mere conceit on his blindness. An allusion to his blindness may or may not be involved in it; but the sense of returning shadow on the mind is quite true to nature on such occasions, and must have been experienced by every one who has lost a person dear to him. There is a beautiful sonnet by Camoens on a similar occasion; a small canzone by Sanazzaro, which ends with saying, that although he waked and missed his lady's hand in his, he still tried to cheat himself by keeping his eyes shut; and three divine dreams of Laura by Petrarch, sonnet 34, vol. ii., son. 79, ib., and the canzone beginning―

"Quando il soave mio filo conforto."

But we must be cautious how we even think of the poets on this most poetical subject, or we shall write three articles instead of one. As it is, we have not left ourselves room for some very agreeable dreams, which we meant to have taken between these our gallant and imaginative sheets. They must be interrupted, as they are too apt to be, like the young lady's in "The Adventures of a Lap Dog," who, blushing divinely, had just uttered the words, "My lord, I am wholly yours," when she was awaked by the jumping up of that officious little puppy.

THOMAS DE QUINCEY. BORN 1785: DIED 1859. (From "The English Mail-Coach," etc.)

THE VISION OF SUDDEN DEATH. WHAT is to be taken as the predominant opinion of man, reflective and philosophic, upon SUDDEN DEATH? It is remarkable that, in different con

ditions of society, sudden death has been variously regarded as the consummation of an earthly career most fervently to be desired, or, again, as that consummation which is with most horror to be deprecated. Cæsar the Dictator,

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sudden death, there would have been a new feature in his act of intemperance—a feature of presumption and irreverence, as in one that, having known himself drawing near to the presence of God, should have suited his demeanour to an expectation so awful. But this is no part of the case supposed. And the only new element in the man's act is not any element of special immorality, but simply of special misfortune.

The other remark has reference to the meaning of the word sudden. Very possibly Cæsar and the Christian Church do not differ in the way supposed; that is, do not differ by any difference of doctrine as between pagan and Christian views of the moral temper appropriate to death, but perhaps they are contemplating different cases. Both contemplate a violent death, 2 Βιαθανατος-death that is Βιαιοs, or, in other words, death that is brought about, not by internal and spontaneous change, but by active force having its origin from without. In this meaning the two authorities agree. Thus far they are in harmony. But the difference is, that the Roman by the word "sudden" means unlingering; whereas the Christian Litany by

at his last dinner party (cana), on the very evening before his assassination, when the minutes of his earthly career were numbered, being asked what death, in his judgment, might be pronounced the most eligible, replied, "That which should be most sudden." On the other hand, the divine Litany of our English Church, when breathing forth supplications, as if in some representative character for the whole human race prostrate before God, places such a death in the very van of horrors: "From lightning and tempest; from plague, pestilence, and famine; from battle and murder, and from SUDDEN DEATH- Good Lord, deliver us.' Sudden death is here made to crown the climax in a grand ascent of calamities; it is ranked among the last of curses; and yet, by the noblest of Romans, it was ranked as the first of blessings. In that difference, most readers will see little more than the essential difference between Christianity and paganism. But this, on consideration, I doubt. The Christian Church may be right in its estimate of sudden death; and it is a natural feeling, though after all it may also be an infirm one, to wish for a quiet dismissal from life-as that which seems most reconcilable with meditation, with peni-"sudden death” means a death without warntential retrospects, and with the humilities of farewell prayer. There does not, however, occur to me any direct scriptural warrant for this earnest petition of the English Litany, unless under a special construction of the word "sudden." It seems a petition—indulged rather and conceded to human infirmity, than exacted from human piety. It is not so much a doctrine built upon the eternities of the Christian system, as a plausible opinion built upon special varieties of physical temperament. Let that, however, be as it may, two remarks suggest themselves as prudent restraints upon a doctrine, which else may wander, and has wandered, into an uncharitable superstition. The first is this: Here at once, in this sharp verbal distinction, that many people are likely to exaggerate the we comprehend the faithful earnestness with horror of a sudden death, from the disposition which a holy Christian Church pleads on behalf to lay a false stress upon words or acts, simply of her poor departing children, that God would because by an accident they have become final vouchsafe to them the last great privilege and words or acts. If a man dies, for instance, by distinction possible on a death-bed, viz., the some sudden death when he happens to be in- opportunity of untroubled preparation for facing toxicated, such a death is falsely regarded with this mighty trial. Sudden death, as a mere peculiar horror; as though the intoxication were variety in the modes of dying, where death in suddenly exalted into a blasphemy. But that is some shape is inevitable, proposes a question of unphilosophic. The man was, or he was not, choice which, equally in the Roman and the habitually a drunkard. If not, if his intoxica- Christian sense, will be variously answered action were a solitary accident, there can be no cording to each man's variety of temperament. reason for allowing special emphasis to this act, Meantime, one aspect of sudden death there is, simply because through misfortune it became one modification, upon which no doubt can his final act. Nor, on the other hand, if it were arise, that of all martyrdoms it is the most no accident, but one of his habitual transgres- agitating, viz., where it surprises a man under sions, will it be the more habitual or the more a circumstances which offer (or which seem to transgression, because some sudden calamity, offer) some hurrying, flying, inappreciably surprising him, has caused this habitual trans-minute chance of evading it. Sudden as the gression to be also a final one. Could the man have had any reason even dimly to foresee his own

ing, consequently without any available summons to religious preparation. The poor mutineer, who kneels down to gather into his heart the bullets from twelve firelocks of his pitying comrades, dies by a most sudden death in Cæsar's sense; one shock, one mighty spasm, one (possibly not one) groan, and all is over. But, in the sense of the Litany, the mutineer's death is far from sudden; his offence originally, his imprisonment, his trial, the interval between his sentence and its execution, having all furnished him with separate warnings of his fate— having all summoned him to meet it with solemn preparation.

danger which it affronts, must be any effort by which such an evasion can be accomplished

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