“Lines composed in sleep on the night of January 9th, 1857. “SCENE.--_Windsor Forest._ “At a vista’s end stood the queen one day Relieved by a sky of the softest hue; It happen’d that a wood-mist risen new, Had made that white which should have been blue. A sunbeam sought on her form to play; It found a nook in the bowery nave, Through which with its golden stem to lave And kiss the leaves of the stately trees That fluttered and rustled beneath the breeze; But it touched not her, to whom ’twas given To walk in a white light pure as heaven.” In the last two of these instances it is impossible to say whether the individuals were really asleep or not, as the opium or other narcotic taken is a very disturbing factor in both conditions, and doubtless was the exciting cause of the activity in the imagination. No more graphic account of the effects of opium in arousing the imagination to its highest pitch has been written than that given by De Quincey.[37] He says: “At night when I lay awake in bed, vast processions passed along in mournful pomp; friezes of never-ending stories, that to my feelings were as sad and solemn as if they were stories drawn from times before Œdipus or Priam, before Tyre, before Memphis. And at the same time a corresponding change took place in my dreams; a theater seemed suddenly opened and lighted up within my brain, which presented nightly spectacles of more than earthly splendor.” And then, after referring to the various scenes of architectural magnificence, and of beautiful women which his imagination conceived, and which forcibly recalls to our minds the poetical effusions of Coleridge and Cromwell, he gives the details of another dream, in which he heard music. “A music of preparation, of awakening suspense; a music like the opening of the Coronation Anthem, and which like _that_ gave the feeling of a vast march, of infinite cavalcades filing off, and the tread of innumerable armies.” In reference to this subject, Dr. Forbes Winslow[38] relates the following interesting case: