Was the heart’s cry of the Ancient Mariner at the recollection of the blessed moment when the fearful curse of life in death fell off him and the heavenly sleep first “slid into his soul.” “Blessings on sleep!” said honest Sancho Panza: “it wraps one all round like a mantle!”—a mantle for the weary human frame, lined softly, as with the down of the eider-duck, and redolent of the soothing odours of the poppy. The fabled Cave of Sleep was in the Land of Darkness. No ray of the sun, or moon, or stars, ever broke upon that night without a dawn. The breath of somniferous flowers floated in on the still air from the grotto’s mouth. Black curtains hung round the ever-sleeping god; the Dreams stood around his couch; Silence kept watch at the portals. Take the winged Dreams from the picture, and what is left? The sleep of matter. The dreams that come floating through our sleep, and fill the dormitory with visions of love or terror—what are they? Random freaks of the fancy? Or is sleep but one long dream, of which we see only fragments, and remember still less? Who shall explain the mystery of that loosening of the soul and body, of which night after night whispers to us, but which day after day is unthought of? Reverie, sleep, trance—such are the stages between the world of man and the world of spirits. Dreaming but deepens as we advance. Reverie deepens into the dreams of sleep—sleep into trance—trance borders on death. As the soul retires from the outer senses, as it escapes from the trammels of the flesh, it lives with increased power within. Spirit grows more spirit-like as matter slumbers. We can follow the development up to the last stage. What is beyond? “And in that _sleep of death_, what dreams may come!” says Hamlet—pausing on the brink of eternity, and vainly striving to scan the inscrutable. Trance is an awful counterpart of sleep and death—mysterious in itself, appalling in its hazards. Day after day noise has been hushed in the dormitory—month after month it has seen a human frame grow weaker and weaker, wanner, more deathlike, till the hues of the grave coloured the face of the living. And now he lies, motionless, pulseless, breathless. It is not sleep—is it death?