He hath awakened from the dream of life....
he was also, we might say, writing the greater part of a good many twentieth-century drawing-room ballads. But to feel the full weight of the semantic burden which this little word can be made to bear in our time we must turn to a modern philosopher, Mr. Santayana, who has brought the use of it to a fine art. “The Divine Comedy,” he writes, “marks high noon in that long day-dream of which Plato’s Dialogues mark the beginning....”
Others to-day are fascinated by their dreams, because they regard them as messengers from that mysterious inner world in which, like the Christians of old, they are beginning to divine depths hitherto unimagined. They feel “forces” at work there which they are tempted to personify in terms of ancient myth—Ahriman, Lucifer, Oedipus, Psyche, and the like. But outside the significant adjective sub-conscious, which has almost certainly come to stay, the effect which such tendencies may have on the English language remains a tale to be told a hundred years hence. The numerous secondary implications unfolding within dream, however, its popularity, and its obvious power of suggesting images, must interest us as further symptoms of a now almost universal consciousness of at any rate the existence of such an “inner” world. In some lines written as a preface to the Recluse—the long, unfinished philosophical poem of which the Prelude and the Excursion were to form parts—Wordsworth has described the holy awe which he, for one, entertained as he realized that he must now set out to explore this world:
Urania, I shall need
Thy guidance, or a greater Muse, if such
Descend to earth or dwell in highest heaven!
For I must tread on shadowy ground, must sink
Deep—and, aloft ascending, breathe in worlds
To which the heaven of heavens is but a veil.
All strength—all terror, single or in bands,