Lowestoffe (who has been turning over the leaves of a Shakspeare while listening.) If any one of you should ever take it into his head to write a book about mysticism——
Atherton. Forbid it, my good genius!
Lowestoffe. I have a motto for him—a motto by ‘sweet Bully Bottom,’ quite in the past-all-utterance mystical strain.
‘I have had a most rare vision. I have had a dream—past the wit of man to say what dream it was. Man is but an ass if he go about to expound this dream. Methought I was, there is no man can tell what. Methought I was, and methought I had. But man is but a patched fool, if he will offer to say what methought I had. The eye of man hath not heard, the ear of man hath not seen; man’s hand is not able to taste, his tongue to conceive, nor his heart to report, what my dream was. I will get Peter Quince to write a ballad of this dream: it shall be called Bottom’s Dream, because it hath no bottom.
CHAPTER III.
What pale dictatress in the air
Feeds, smiling sadly, her fine ghostlike form,
With earth’s real blood and breath, the beauteous life
She makes despised for ever?
Browning.