"But there will come another era, when it shall be light, and when man shall awaken from his lofty dreams and find _his dreams still there, and that nothing is gone save his sleep_."--Jean Paul.--_Preface to "Hesperus."_ The following paragraph is taken from a diary which I kept before my decease. I will explain later on my reason for giving the extract here:-- "It has been said that no man can realize to the full the certainty of his own dissolution; that each acknowledges the inevitability of death in regard to others and to the race, but cherishes a secret conviction that he himself will, through some strange and unforeseen circumstance, prove the solitary exception. "Of the truth of this assertion as a general rule, I cannot of course speak, but I know that I at least have never so thought. On the contrary, there are moments when death (by which I do not mean annihilation, but the dying into life) seems the only certainty there is before me, all else being shadowy and unreal. I am a child of eternity dreaming the dream of time, and even while I dream I am half awake and know that I am but dreaming. Life is to me--not poetically only, but positively--a dream and unsubstantial. The world is a dream, things and persons are but dreams, and exist for me only in my thoughts of them. My self-consciousness becomes awake, and I look in and down upon myself with a wonder as fresh and novel as if the mystery of my own existence had never caused me wonder or surprise before. I stretch out my hand, as an infant does, and open and shut the fingers, and ask myself who I am and what I am doing here. I tell myself my name, and I see that the hand, the body, and the clothes that I look down upon have a strangely familiar aspect, but the name conveys no meaning to me, the familiarity is but the familiarity of an oft-dreamed dream, and is, I know, but the sign that I am still dreaming. "I look out each day upon the face of the earth with as much wonder and surprise as if I were some new-comer thereon, and were opening my eyes upon it for the first and only time. Upon London and the life of it, though I passed half my days within the sound of St. Paul's, I gaze and wonder as upon some dream-pageant, with ever-increasing awe. I look up upon that ample dome, large-looming, and brooding like a Presence athwart the skies, until its surroundings and itself and those who come and go in the streets are to me as unsubstantial as 'a city visioned in a dream.' "So supremely conscious am I at such times that 'We are such stuff As dreams are made of, and our little life Is rounded with a sleep,' that were I, while this mood is on me, to open my eyes one morning and find that all this present world and its dream-creations had passed away for ever, there would hardly stir in my heart one momentary thrill of surprise, for I should but sigh and say, 'Ah, then, at last it has come, and now I am asleep no longer!'