"Very lovely, but not much better than what I asked for. In revenge, I will give you one of Heine's that my brother translated. It always reminds me, with a great difference, of one in In Memoriam, beginning: _Dark house_." So spake Harry, and sang: "The shapes of the days forgotten Out of their graves arise, And show me what once my life was, In the presence of thine eyes. "All day through the streets I wandered, As in dreams men go and come; The people in wonder looked at me, I was so mournful dumb. "It was better though, at night-fall, When, through the empty town, I and my shadow together Went silent up and down. "With echoing, echoing footstep, Over the bridge I walk; The moon breaks out of the waters, And looks as if she would talk. "I stood still before thy dwelling, Like a tree that prays for rain; I stood gazing up at thy window-- My heart was in such pain. "And thou lookedst through thy curtains-- I saw thy shining hand; And thou sawest me, in the moonlight, Still as a statue stand." "Excuse me," said Mrs. Cathcart, with a smile, "but I don't think such sentimental songs good for anybody. They can't be _healthy_--I believe that is the word they use now-a-days." "I don't say they are," returned the doctor; "but many a pain is relieved by finding its expression. I wish he had never written worse." "That is not why I like them," said the curate. "They seem to me to hold the same place in literature that our dreams do in life. If so much of our life is actually spent in dreaming, there must be some place in our literature for what corresponds to dreaming. Even in this region, we cannot step beyond the boundaries of our nature. I delight in reading Lord Bacon now; but one of Jean Paul's dreams will often give me more delight than one of Bacon's best paragraphs. It depends upon the mood. Some dreams like these, in poetry or in sleep, arouse individual states of consciousness altogether different from any of our waking moods, and not to be recalled by any mere effort of the will. All our being, for the moment, has a new and strange colouring. We have another kind of life. I think myself, our life would be much poorer without our dreams; a thousand rainbow tints and combinations would be gone; music and poetry would lose many an indescribable exquisiteness and tenderness. You see I like to take our dreams seriously, as I would even our fun. For I believe that those new mysterious feelings that come to us in sleep, if they be only from dreams of a richer grass and a softer wind than we have known awake, are indications of wells of feeling and delight which have not yet broken out of their hiding-places in our souls, and are only to be suspected from these rings of fairy green that spring up in the high places of our sleep." "I say, Ralph," interrupted Harry, "just repeat that strangest of Heine's ballads, that--"