NIGHTMARE.
Unhappily for us all, in the world of visions and dreams, there is a dark side to human life. Here have been dreamed out all the crimes which have steeped our race in shame since the expulsion from Eden, and all the wars that have cursed mankind since the birth of history. Alexander the Great was a monster whose sword drank the blood of a conquered world. Julius Cæsar marched his invincible armies, like juggernauts, over the necks of fallen nations. Napoleon Bonaparte rose with the morning of the nineteenth century, and stood, like some frightful comet, on its troubled horizon. Distraught with the dream of conquest and empire, he hovered like a god on the verge of battle. Kings and emperors stood aghast. The sun of Austerlitz was the rising sun of his glory and power, but it went down, veiled in the dark clouds of Waterloo, and Napoleon the Great, uncrowned, unthroned, and stunned by the dreadful shock that annihilated the Grand Army and the Old Guard, "wandered aimlessly about on the lost field," in the gloom that palled a fallen empire, as Hugo describes him, "the somnambulist of a vast, shattered dream."
INFIDELITY.
It is in the desert of evil, where virtue trembles to tread, where hope falters, and where faith is crucified, that the infidel dreams. To him, all there is of heaven is bounded by this little span of life; all there is of pleasure and love is circumscribed by a few fleeting years; all there is of beauty is mortal; all there is of intelligence and wisdom is in the human brain; all there is of mystery and infinity is fathomable by human reason, and all there is of virtue is measured by the relations of man to man. To him, all must end in the "tongueless silence of the dreamless dust," and all that lies beyond the grave is a voiceless shore and a starless sky. To him, there are no prints of deathless feet on its echoless sands, no thrill of immortal music in its joyless air.
He has lost his God, and like some fallen seraph flying in rayless night, he gropes his way on flagging pinions, searching for light where darkness reigns, for life where Death is King.