Rossini once unexpectedly met his old friend Sir Henry Bishop, but having at the moment forgotten his name, after puzzling and stammering for some time, he at length took him by the hand, and sang a few bars to prove he identified him through Bishop’s beautiful song, “Blow gentle gales.”
MARRIAGE VOW.
The matrimonial ceremony, like many others, has undergone some variation in the progress of time. Upwards of three centuries ago, the husband, on taking his wife by the right hand, thus addressed her; “I, A. B., undersygne thee, C. D., for my wedded wyfe, for beter, for worse, for richer, for porer, yn sekness, and in helthe, tyl dethe us departe, [not “do part,” as now erroneously rendered, departe formerly meaning to separate,] as holy churche hath ordeyned, and thereto I plyght thee my trowthe.” The wife replied in the same form, with an additional clause, “to be buxum to thee, tyl dethe us departe.” So it appears in the first edition of the Missals for the use of the famous and celebrated Church of Hereford, 1502. In the Salisbury Missal, the lady promised “to be bonere [debonnair] and buxum in bedde and at the borde.”
COMPOSITION IN DREAMS.
Condorcet is said to have attained the conclusion of some of his most abstruse unfinished calculations in his dreams. Franklin makes a similar admission concerning some of his political projects, which in his waking moments sorely puzzled him. Herschel composed the following lines in a dream:—
“Throw thyself on thy God, nor mock him with feeble denial;
Sure of his love, and, oh! sure of his mercy at last;
Bitter and deep though the draught, yet drain thou the cup of thy trial,
And, in its healing effect, smile at the bitterness past.”
Goethe says in his Memoirs, “The objects which had occupied my attention during the day often reappeared at night in connected dreams. On awakening, a new composition, or a portion of one I had already commenced, presented itself to my mind.” Coleridge composed his poem of the Abyssinian Maid during a dream. Cockburn says of Lord Jeffrey:—“He had a fancy that though he went to bed with his head stuffed with the names, dates, and other details of various causes, they were all in order in the morning; which he accounted for by saying that during sleep they all crystallized round their proper centres.”