I have been a dreamer all my life. The earliest recollections of my childhood are of dreams of greatness. My boyhood's visions were peopled with warlike tumults. There were no spring mornings to my brain even in early youth; my heart was clouded with shadow, and sadness reigned when mirth and careless glee should have been pre-eminent. My manhood has been a fitful, feverish, and painful existence. I have outlived all whom I ever cared for; I have seen those whom I idolized lie before me cold and senseless; and now, with every event vividly impressed upon my memory, each tone of the voice of her I loved dropping like liquid fire into my brain, and drying up the tears that would weep away my anguish--feeling all this with intensity, and longing for the free air of heaven, I find myself alone--desolate--and HERE!! Oh! the horror of this prison-solitude--the anxious watching for the pale morning after sleepless nights--the horrible nights when fantastic shapes are alone visible, mocking at and jeering me--when the only sounds I hear are the ravings of some wretched maniac, confined, like myself, because we have made for ourselves a world, and our imaginations have created a presiding divinity; and, should a laugh disturb the silence, it is the outbreak of a maddened spirit seeking relief from thought--a laugh frightful, because a mockery--sad in its boisterousness--"_the laugh which laughs not_." For many weary years I have been pent up in this prison, pining for freedom, hoping for things which never existed, conjuring up anticipations of a brighter future, calling upon her who made "The starlight of my boyhood," to look down upon me from her blest abode, and woo me back to calmness by one gentle word, one loving glance; and then sinking into hopeless, bitter despondency, when I remembered that she was gone, and that I should see her no more. Sometimes I can think of her in her exquisite beauty, and my soul drinks in, as it were, the sweet and liquid tones of the voice which once spoke peace to me, and, fancying her again before me, I sink into an unquiet slumber, till some hideous dream oppresses me, and I see the fair brow of my "Julia" contracted, withered; and instead of her silvery voice of enchantment, a hissing sound escapes the lips I have worshipped. I rise, and try to approach, but she recedes. I awake--I start from my uneasy bed--I find this horrible picture, which bore the impress of reality, is but a dream. I awake to the consciousness that my beloved is dead, and that my eyes will gaze upon her beauty no more. How few there are in this busy world who, when passing those abodes of wretchedness--"private madhouses"--can imagine the agony, the misery, the despair that dwells there! But to my history.