CHAPTER VII.
SHOWS THE FITNESS OF MY PUNISHMENT.
"But there will come another era, when it shall be light, and when man shall awaken from his lofty dreams and find his dreams still there, and that nothing is gone save his sleep."—Jean Paul.—Preface to "Hesperus."
The following paragraph is taken from a diary which I kept before my decease. I will explain later on my reason for giving the extract here:—
"It has been said that no man can realize to the full the certainty of his own dissolution; that each acknowledges the inevitability of death in regard to others and to the race, but cherishes a secret conviction that he himself will, through some strange and unforeseen circumstance, prove the solitary exception.
"Of the truth of this assertion as a general rule, I cannot of course speak, but I know that I at least have never so thought. On the contrary, there are moments when death (by which I do not mean annihilation, but the dying into life) seems the only certainty there is before me, all else being shadowy and unreal. I am a child of eternity dreaming the dream of time, and even while I dream I am half awake and know that I am but dreaming. Life is to me—not poetically only, but positively—a dream and unsubstantial. The world is a dream, things and persons are but dreams, and exist for me only in my thoughts of them. My self-consciousness becomes awake, and I look in and down upon myself with a wonder as fresh and novel as if the mystery of my own existence had never caused me wonder or surprise before. I stretch out my hand, as an infant does, and open and shut the fingers, and ask myself who I am and what I am doing here. I tell myself my name, and I see that the hand, the body, and the clothes that I look down upon have a strangely familiar aspect, but the name conveys no meaning to me, the familiarity is but the familiarity of an oft-dreamed dream, and is, I know, but the sign that I am still dreaming.
"I look out each day upon the face of the earth with as much wonder and surprise as if I were some new-comer thereon, and were opening my eyes upon it for the first and only time. Upon London and the life of it, though I passed half my days within the sound of St. Paul's, I gaze and wonder as upon some dream-pageant, with ever-increasing awe. I look up upon that ample dome, large-looming, and brooding like a Presence athwart the skies, until its surroundings and itself and those who come and go in the streets are to me as unsubstantial as 'a city visioned in a dream.'
"So supremely conscious am I at such times that
'We are such stuff
As dreams are made of, and our little life
Is rounded with a sleep,'