This knot I knit,
To know the thing, I know not yet,
That I may see,
The man that shall my husband be,
How he goes, and what he wears,
And what he does, all days and years.
Accordingly in your dream you will see him; if a musician, with a lute or other instrument; if a scholar, with a book or papers;” and he adds a little encouragement to use this device in the following anecdote. “A gentlewoman that I knew, confessed in my hearing that she used this method, and dreamt of her husband whom she had never seen. About two or three years after, as she was on Sunday at church (at our Lady’s Church in Sarum), up pops a young Oxonian in the pulpit; she cries out presently to her sister, ‘This is the very face of the man that I saw in my dream. Sir William Soame’s lady did the like.’” It is hardly needful to remind readers of Keats’s “Eve of St. Agnes,” and the story of Madeline,—
Whose heart had brooded, all that wintry day,
On love, and wing’d St. Agnes’ saintly care,
As she had heard old dames full many times declare.