“I hear thy voice in dreams upon me softly call;
I see thy form as when thou wert a living thing.”
In the dream, ambition is lifted to the loftiest pinnacle of her high aspirings; and power and riches are showered in profusion in the path of their votaries from the cornucopia of fancy; and all this with a depth and intensity that gilds for a time the moments of waking life. And I agree with Saint Augustine, that if we sleep and dream in Paradise, our existence will be perfectly felicitous.
But then, alas! the cruel waking from this world of pleasure. I have breathed many a sigh of sympathy with Milton’s dream of his dead wife, and with Crabbe, in his “World of Dreams.”
You remember, Evelyn, how oft you have wondered at my absence from our college cœna. You thought not that I was then deeply studying how I might gain a victory over my thoughts in sleep. As my waking memory would, from some indefinite cause, be re-excited after it had seemed to fade and die, so the subject of my dreams has been resumed after many months, without any chain of relative thoughts in the interval. I believed then that this might be a dream; that I had dreamt the same before; but on the morning of the second dream, reflection assured me that on the morning of the first I had known and thought on it. I was waiting for a golden hour of inspiration, and it was granted me. One night came o’er my slumber a dream of beauty: there was an innocent happiness, a sense of purest pleasure, that might be the beatitude of a peri ere she lost her place in Eden. In the morning, the dream was a part of my being; I nursed it throughout the live-long day, and at night lay me down to slumber, and again with the sleep came the dream. I was thus the monarch of an ideal world: the dream was my life, so long as my thoughts were on it concentrated, and even study was a Rembrandt shadow on its brightness.
In a moment of rapture, I cried, —
“We forget how superior, to mortals below,
Is the fiction they dream to the truth which they know.”
I opened the leaf of a volume, in which an accomplished pen had traced an episode so like my own, as to make me wonder at its truth.
It was of a visionary German, who, like myself, commanded the phantasie of sleep’s own world, bringing one night thus in connexion with another. He fashioned, like Pygmalion, his idol, Love, and nightly met and wooed, till he won her to his heart, and then he cried,—“What if this glorious sleep be a real life, and this dull waking the true repose?” At length his ideal of beauty, his dream, died, stung by a serpent. And then the order of the vision was reversed; the dream lay again before him, dead and withered; he saw his idol only when he was awake, and this was to him a dream. He pined in thought, and died,—sleeping.