“Embrace her as my natural good;
Or crush her, like a vice of blood,
Upon the threshold of the mind?”
reject, and turn away from the impostures of a sorrowing imagination?
IV.
In sleep there is no struggle of the will; and he communes with his own heart, which is beating so low; a condition that must be caused by a sense of “something lost.”
“Break,” he says, still addressing his heart, but in metaphor;
“Break, thou deep vase of chilling tears,
That grief hath shaken into frost.”
This must refer to the scientific fact, that water can be lowered in temperature below the freezing point, without solidifying; but it expands at once into ice if disturbed; and the suddenness of the expansion breaks the containing vessel.
Clouds of undefined trouble, such as “dreams are made of,” pass “below the darken’d eyes,” that is, figure themselves on the brain under the eyelids; but on awaking, the will reasserts its power, and protests against the folly of such mourning. He would therefore dismiss the phantom, Sorrow.
V.